“Social Psychology” originally aired on NBC Thursday night, October 8, 2009
One of the hazards of making new friends is navigating the ancillary connections that come with them. Just because you have a rapport with someone doesn’t mean you’ll click in the same way with everyone else they know. Similarly, a sitcom may live or die on the strength of its main cast, but in order to keep its stories fresh and flesh out its worldbuilding, it needs to organically integrate a rotating stable of guest stars and recurring characters. Two of Greendale’s most distinctive bench players make their first appearances here, though only one of them would become a mainstay beyond the first season 1. The first and most prominent in the episode is the hackysacking, tortured rhyme-writing, tiny-nippled Ultimate hippie bro Vaughn2 (Eric Christian Olsen), who initially appears to threaten the Jeff-Britta pairing, giving us the strongest development we’ve seen on the apparent premise of the show (and entire reason why the study group got together in the first place) since the pilot. The second is perennial Greendale student and alleged Mark David Chapman lookalike Garrett (Erik Charles Nielsen) who stands out by being the only person in Professor Duncan’s study besides Annie and Duncan to actually get any lines, and for his, let’s say, uniquely agitated manner of delivering dialogue.
Although it has always bummed me out a little that Vaughn was written off the show at the end of the first season, he just wasn’t the type of character that fit well into the show this would become. Greendale is still mostly just an ordinary low-rent institution at this stage, not the absurd, off-the-wall, cartoon fever dream-world of later seasons, so the kind of stereotyped broad caricature that Vaughn represents lends the setting a more generic and universal quality. Garrett would turn out to be a much more specifically Greendalian creature. If, as my compatriot Tereglith posited last week, Professor Whitman is the teacher who truly embodies the spirit of Greendale, i would single out Garrett as the school’s most representative student — the person that God spilled, perpetually perturbed at every setback, seemingly unable to function at even the most basic level. And yet some stubborn, indomitable spirit keeps possessing him to register and attend classes year after year, meeting each indignity and adversity with nothing more powerful than sheer dogged persistence. Vaughn is an immediately-recognizable type that can slot comfortably into any campus on earth; Garrett is a character you will *only* find at Greendale, the school where everyone is accepted, whatever their disqualifications.
After spending a couple of episodes mostly on the back burner, Jeff and Britta’s burgeoning flirtation/mutual hatelust (?)3 comes front and center with the appearance of Vaughn and his officiously laidback “no worries” persona. An eminently mockable type like this often becomes nothing more than fodder for easy jokes, but the script for “Social Psychology”4 actually attempts to imbue the character with a modicum of dignity and humanity, especially in his third-act breakdown upon discovering the study group roasting the shit out of the terrible poem he wrote for Britta. Betraying someone’s trust and sharing something private with others for the sake of a cheap laugh seems like a classic Winger move, but the temptation to abuse this sensitive information to assuage his feelings of inadequacy over losing Britta to a romantic rival comes directly from the deceivingly sweet-and-wholesome Shirley Bennett. Shirley’s character hasn’t had much of an opportunity to showcase her personality yet, so pairing her up with the lead of the show via finally having them bond over their shared love of laying sick burns on everyone in sight is a remarkably inspired touch, and Yvette Nicole Brown more than rises to the occasion, playing both the gleeful, sadistic savagery and the ensuing guilt and remorse brilliantly.
In truth, a character with a kind-hearted exterior turning out to harbor a mean streak could fairly be considered a cliched turn of events, but the way it is deployed here to complicate the Jeff-Britta relationship succeeds in revealing new layers to these already familiar and lived-in characters. Without giving up hope of them hooking up, Jeff does actually make a sincere, good faith effort to respect Britta’s wishes that they remain just friends, to the point where he hesitates when Shirley gives him the opening to rip into Vaughn. Of course, because he is Jeff Winger, this effort eventually crumbles, but it leads to him and Britta achieving a better understanding of the boundaries they need to maintain in order to stay on good terms. For her part, Britta has an agency in this episode that you don’t typically see in your standard sitcom love interest, confiding her doubts about the intense feelings Vaughn is catching for her to Jeff, and expressing regret (and even a little shame) when he happens across their PDA on the quad. It’s not that she knows Vaughn is wrong for her and needs to choose Jeff — she is clearly attracted to Vaughn and enjoys spending time with him — it’s more that her casual approach to dating has taken on a different implication now that she has made these new connections with Jeff and the study group. What she does now affects their whole social dynamic, an unintended consequence that further pays off later in the season, with “Romantic Expressionism”. When we see ourselves through the eyes of others, even if we don’t know them that well yet, it can cast our own behavior in a more unflattering light, even if those people aren’t overtly judgmental.
While the slightly-older members of the study group struggle to work through these new relationships maturely, it is Annie, the youngest, who finds out just how lousy it can feel when you use people you care about for your own ends. Seizing the opportunity to participate in Professor Duncan’s “make people wait in a room until they snap” study a year early, she agrees to bring two human subjects along, settling on the unwitting Abed and Troy. Chang happens to be there too, in his first scene out of the position of power he wields in the classroom, and predictably becomes the first to blow a complete gasket and storm out of the study in a state of complete emotional distress. Future episodes5 would set up an “archnemeses” relationship between Chang and Duncan, and while that’s not much present here, it’s fun to think that their antipathy originally began because a community college Spanish teacher who could use eight bucks ended up trapped in an experiment that was supposed to start at nine.
Some mysteries of the universe are too beautiful and complex to be understood. Perhaps it will never be entirely clear exactly why Donald Glover crying is the funniest thing ever, and all we can ever do is marvel at the almost destructively hilarious power of it. This, my friends, is our first indication that Troy Barnes is unquestionably the secret weapon of this particular ensemble, capable of hitting the most histrionic comedic and emotional notes with marksman-like precision, in a way that remains authentic to the character. The “cool, composed, kinda dumb” jock facade falls away just long enough to hint at the hidden depths of his “exuberant, open-hearted, still kinda dumb” true characterization, which would lend itself to far greater humorous and narrative possibilities than anyone could have foreseen. In fact, if i were feeling less charitable, i would accuse the show of leaning a little too hard on his capacity for eliciting laughs through hysterical displays of inconsolable grief and essentially running the gimmick into the ground, and it wouldn’t be unfair of me. But since this episode times and paces his outburst for maximum effectiveness, there’s not much reason to complain about the microdose we get of it here.
Unflappable to the last, Abed is the one who breaks the Duncan Principle and eventually guilts Annie into an apology, but notice how Alison Brie’s bottomlessly expressive face already begins to show signs of regret during Troy’s screaming fit. The extent of her lingering unrequited crush on Troy has not been revealed yet, but as the two first-year college students of this study group, fresh out of Riverside High, they always shared the connection of being at the same stage in life, experiencing these new rites of passage into adulthood together with their older friends of varying ages. They will navigate the uncharted territory awaiting them in sometimes wildly-diverging ways that are rooted in their deeply-understood characters, but through the turmoil will always have each other to return to as comforting and familiar sources of stability, culminating in such truly resonant scenes as their moment toward the end of “Mixology Certification”6. Annie and Troy might low-key be my favorite pairing of this uncommonly strong cast, made all the more so because they never become anything more than good friends. Their initial positioning as the “B-couple” of the show might come across as nothing more than an early abandoned plotline at first glance, but the “moving on from a youthful attraction” turn plays out as an important step for Annie’s growth and development.
But this particular episode is still mainly an Annie-Abed story, and like these other early pairings, takes the formula of bringing together two characters with conflicting or incompatible goals and interests and eventually moves them toward common ground, symbolized here by a gift of the first three Indiana Jones movies on DVD. Shirley and Annie actually end up in very similar places by the third act of the episode, both reckoning with the dark sides that lurk beneath their sweet and winsome personas, Annie’s tainted by her ambition, Shirley’s corrupted by her need to take people down a peg. While these tendencies may have the potential to alienate the people around them, the episode allows for some moments of personal growth by having them honestly deal with the consequences. Reluctant cat-sitting and naked study partner dreams aside, hopefully Shirley and Jeff’s agreement not to indulge each other’s inner insult comic means that she won’t get so carried away with her trash talk that she gets kicked out of another study group. Similarly, maybe Annie’s drive to succeed can continue to bring out the best in those around her without overruling her friendships quite as often. For this unlikeliest of families, the honeymoon phase is now officially over, and the ongoing challenge of maintaining these tenuous relationships will become the primary focus of their lives. Like Greendale itself, all it will take for them to stay together is learning to accept each other.
NOTES AND QUOTES
VAUGHN: i asked politely, and the panda took his pants off
TROY: Do they do stuff to your butt?
ANNIE: No
TROY: Do you get paid more if they do stuff to your butt?
ABED: They’re showing all four Indiana Joneses at the Vista. i’m really looking forward to the first three
DUNCAN: The Duncan Principle is simple. Namely, that the more control lost by — Yeah, i’m gonna write this down too, actually, that’s a good point
TROY: THE SOUL TRAIN AWARDS WERE TONIGHT! YOU PROMISED BUTT STUFF!
SHIRLEY: i don’t see why you two aren’t together. Two cute white people going to the same school, it just seems right
SHIRLEY: My kids got hamsters with bigger nips!
DUNCAN: Go kill John Lennon again, you loser
JEFF: And what makes Frisbee ultimate?
VAUGHN: This is the least tight thing that’s ever happened to me
JEFF: Britta is never gonna forgive me. I can’t believe i showed you that poem. Oh my god, my life is Degrassi High
BADGER: No worries, man
VAUGHN: Uh, some worries man. Some worries
BADGER: …Whoa