“Still Cool as a Zombie”: Community, the Zombie Aesthetic, and the Politics of Belonging

From Night of the Living Dead (1968) to The Walking Dead (2010–2022), zombie media offers a consistent refrain, namely to avoid becoming a zombie. This refrain makes intuitive sense. Why would anyone welcome becoming a member of a roaming, mindless, and often violent undead horde symbolizing humanity’s destruction? However, zombification has affirmative, emancipatory possibilities. In “Epidemiology,” from Season 2 of the NBC sitcom Community (2009–2015), we see the zombie’s affirmative and emancipatory potential. In this essay, I argue zombification enlivens Community by provoking the show to rethink its relationship to its nominal protagonist, Jeff Winger, and to itself as a piece of avant-garde comedy television produced during the “Golden Age of Television,” what media scholars also call, “Peak” or “Prestige TV.” In this episode, Community evolves its understanding of its central protagonist by shifting, in some respects, from a conventional and historically predictable character to a character far less conventional.