NBC has cancelled Community, the critically acclaimed but little-watched sitcom about disbarred lawyer Jeff Winger (Joel McHale) and a community college full of misfits. Sound generic? It was anything but. Community's heart was in meta-humour, in consciousness of its own fictionality. The sort of thing which would be called “ambitious” in a student play, Community's existential indulgences were revelatory in a major sitcom.

We've all heard of breaking the fourth wall, but it's still unusual to see a sitcom revel in its make-believe status. Led by Abed (Danny Pudi), a character whose developmental disorder leads him to understand the world through fiction, the show opened up a whole new world of creative possibilities. This was a sitcom in on the joke of being a sitcom.

Naked homage in canon was possible. So was periodically slipping into genre storytelling. One episode was even done in the style of a 1980s sidescroller (seriously), others with puppets and claymation.

First two seasons of your sitcom criticised for being too zany to attract a mass audience? Open the third sitcom with a song featuring the lines “We're going to sing like a mainstream dream/ and be appealing to all mankind/ We're gonna have more fun and be less weird/ than the first two years combined.” Did I mention this was on in a major slot of a major channel?

So why should you care? Despite its unspectacular ratings, Community was the sitcom which reflected the zeitgeist. We live in a world obsessed by its own self-awareness. Selfies. Irony. Social media. This is all part of the new meta, a consciousness of the processes which create our image.

Community didn't just tell a story. It told the story of the story being told. It channelled the same self-awareness which defines our media age. When showrunner Dan Harmon returned to the show in its fifth season, having been fired before the fourth season in NBC's vain attempt to make a normal sitcom, Community openly disparaged the previous season as “the gas leak year”. When Dan Harmon found a fan video shipping Jeff and Annie (Allison Brie) to the mellow tones of Sara Bareilles, he liked it so much that he used his own money to buy the rights to the song for the next season.

In the end, the story behind Community became just as important to the show as the stories within. This show was a show with a real connection to its fans, who campaigned for the show's survival under the hashtag (what else?) #sixseasonsandamovie, a phrase coined in the show, of course.

Despite the show's very average ratings, Community's fans created such a buzz that the show was able to justify its existence. Dedicated fans are nothing new, of course, but only now are they able to shape the discourse surrounding their show with hashtags and Facebook statuses. Social media presence spawns media coverage, and media coverage in turn generates its own social media response. Community's fans were undeniably responsible for the extra years their under-performing sitcom lived on borrowed time.

That's why the cancelling of Community leaves behind a peculiar sadness. It wasn't a Firefly situation; Community's fans weren't deprived of a meaningful body of work. But having spent so long struggling for its survival, and having made the show's characters and fans one in that struggle, Community's demise still feels premature. For once, the thin wall between real and not real has proved impenetrable. The dream of #sixseasonsandamovie will have to go unfulfilled.