Community: The 10 Saddest Things About Abed

Dan Harmon’s Community connected with its audience in a strange and inspiring way that few television series nowadays actually do. Evolving away from the traditional sitcom formula, Community experimented with a variety of high concept, genre-bending episodes yet still managed to deliver each one with a tangible sense of heart. There’s no better example of this than in the study group’s pop culture aficionado, Abed Nadir.

Abed embodies everything about Community‘s conceit to reference, celebrate, and twist pop culture tropes as well as the darkest, most alienating aspects about the outcasts and troublemakers that reside in Greendale. While it would’ve been easy to make Abed a cheap cartoon of film nerds, the series had more than enough touching moments with him to give the man who lives in television some depth.

10 Getting Bullied In School

Abed Nadir has been very open about the fact that he saw the inside of his locker more often than actual people during his time in school. Being the de facto weird kid of every class room, Abed was the ideal target for anyone who didn’t or refused to understand his eccentricities.

This was a huge part of his backstory in “Virtual System Analysis” where a slight shift in the group’s dynamic made him afraid of being isolated and tortured once again. While that may seem ridiculous to think of the study group, Abed has only known them for a few years but has lived an entire life where people have been quick to dismiss and abandon him.

9 His Parents’ Divorce

While school time traumas are hard on any kid, they’re not the only source of Abed’ tensions in the series. Abed’s own abandonment issues and difficulty with relating and spending time with people can be tied back to his parents’ nasty break up. Due to strong, cultural differences,

Abed’s mom and dad were apparently arguing constantly during his childhood, and Abed often found himself in the middle of their debates. This would eventually lead to Abed’s mother leaving when he was six, and his father to subconsciously pressure his son, either depending on him to carry on his falafel legacy or blaming him for his wife leaving.

8 His Lost Christmas Tradition

While fans have gotten a pretty good look at Abed’s father in the episodes “Introduction to Film” and “Basic Genealogy,” they’ve yet to actually meet his mother. While he’s mentioned her in passing, she’s been about as present in the series as she’s been in Abed’s life.

This became the core of one of Community‘s greatest holiday specials, “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas,” where Abed starts experiencing Christmas-themed, stop-motion animated delusions. After losing his mother and their yearly, Christmas tradition to her new family, Abed began projecting his wants unto the world itself.

7 His Emotional Alienation

Community has hinted every now and then that Abed has some form of social disorder, though they’ve played things very safe by just saying that he’s undiagnosed. Regardless of any actual medical intervention, Abed’s difficulty connecting with other people is apparent and has been a consistent issue in the series.

He often has a hard time reading the subtle and not-so-subtle social nuances of the group and has even admitted to practicing facial expressions in the mirror. His Dreamatorium is an entire monument to a false dichotomy in social interaction that, when he’s not playing Inspector Spacetime, has him generalize fantasies about the group that just reaffirm his own, limited understanding of them.

6 His Dependency On TV And Film

Abed has a profound knowledge of most types of pop culture media, including but not limited to comic books, sitcoms, underground B-movies, and classic films. While this knowledge has allowed an outlet for plenty of Dan Harmon’s classic meta-jokes, the frequency of them does paint the picture of a man who can hardly tell the difference between reality and fiction.

Seriously, the guy frequently struggles to tell the difference between life and reality to the point of hallucination. Having depended on media all of his life for human interaction, Abed has both limited and misinformed his understanding of the people around him.

5 His Failed Film Career

All of Abed’s pop culture knowledge isn’t necessarily just a hobby. It’s manifested throughout the series as his ambition to become a big filmmaker. Multiple points in the series, either as fictional projects of his iconic “Documentary Filmmaking” episodes, Abed has used Greendale and its inherent chaos to practice his budding film career.

Despite all of this work, it didn’t actually lead Abed to becoming a successful filmmaker, at least, in the space between Season 5 and 6. After graduating from Greendale with a basic film degree, Abed struggled to find film work, with his most notable project being an ad for Jeff that Mr. Winger didn’t even pay for. Fortunately for him, he would find a new film position at the end of Season 6 though there’s no telling until the movie (if there will even be one) if he gets anything out of it.

4 His Lost Romances

Being as aloof as he is, it shouldn’t be a surprise that Abed has struggled to find dates in the series. There have been some glimmers of romance, such as when he started seeing a Secret Service agent and the time that dated Captain Marvel.

However, neither of those actually lasted long, despite the series desperately trying to find at least one person who could relate to Abed at a deeper level that’s not named Troy Barnes. The reason for this was put into pretty certain terms in “Early 21st Century Romanticism,” in which, a cute librarian that both he and Abed were romantically pursuing rejects him for being weird.

3 He Never Got To Do Die Hard

If Dan Armon and Danny Pudi have any regrets in the series, besides the “Gas Leak Year,” it would be the fact that they never actually got to do Die Hard. Christmas specials have always been, well, special in Community. They allowed an outlet for the creators to explore the grandiose themes of the holiday through some fun, genre twists.

While holiday films have plenty of territory to explore, Abed expressed explicit interest on paying homage to Die Hard but never got the time to do so. The closest that the story got was the episode where the study group held their history professor hostage, and Abed wore a John McClane t-shirt.

2 His Pillows And Blankets War With Troy

It’s never easy to see two, close friends fight, even if it’s with fluffy pillows and blankets. In the appropriately named “Pillow and Blankets,” Troy wants to set a world record by making it out of blankets; but since the two had already built a blanket fort before, Abed denied this. These creative differences would eventually lead to a massive war between the students to see who could have bedding supremacy.

While many were likely just doing this to get out of class (looking at you, Jeff Winger), Troy and Abed treated the affair very seriously, going as far as to put their friendship on the line. Inevitably, this led to the two trying to endlessly fight so that they wouldn’t have to leave each other in the end.

1 Having To Say Goodbye To His Best And First Friend

One of the saddest moments in Community history was seeing one of the most beloved characters, Troy Barnes, leave the group to explore the world (but mostly start a wildly successful music career). As part of a very grand send off, Abed started a school wide game of The Floor is Lava, putting up a $50,000 award for the winner.

While this was treated as an outlet for some good fun and less-good competition for most of the school, this was really a way for Abed to try and keep Troy around a little longer, with his own death in the game leading to a shut down of his entire being. Fortunately enough, Troy and Britta were able to make a decent clone of Abed to take his place.