15 Years Ago, a Forgotten Superhero TV Show Had a Shocking End (And It Inspired Community’s Most Iconic Line)

On January 9, 2011, NBC would premiere the first two episodes of The Cape, an original superhero TV series from creator Tom Wheeler. Starring David Lyons as Vince Faraday, a cop turned superhero who gets left for dead and then taken in by circus performers who moonlight as thieves, The Cape had all the makings of a classic comic from a certain era. In the series, he utilizes his training from the circus and its leader, Max Malini (Keith David), using acrobatics, tightrope walking, and illusion tricks, alongside his titular cape, to try and stop crime while also clearing his name and bringing down the devious leader of Palm City.

It sounds all well and good from the surface, but The Cape was largely ignored by the public. Reviews for the series were mixed at best, with a 54 rating on Metacritic. What’s most noteworthy about the series is two-fold, though, the first being how its ending was completely botched by the network and the second being a creative gag that had almost nothing to do with the show itself. In the end, The Cape is largely forgotten, but the joke it inspired on Community is a meme that everyone still references even today.

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The Cape Had a Disrespectful Ending

The deck was largely stacked against The Cape before it even premiered. Though it was created and produced at a time when superhero media was really taking off, the series has an old-fashioned view of the genre that didn’t align with what viewers were really interested in. By the time the 2010s had rolled around, Iron Man kick-started the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and all eyes were on the impending release of The Avengers. In addition to that, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight took Batman into a realistic realm and grossed over $1 billion doing that. So when The Cape, with its Silver Age-inspired “superhero learns the tricks of the trade from a circus and uses it to fight crime” story, premiered in 2011, it harkened back to an era of superheroes that the public had next door to zero interest in.

The Cape had a two-episode debut in 2011, bringing in an audience of 8.45 million at the time, but coming in fourth place for the networks and losing out to episodes of Family Guy, Desperate Housewives, and Undercover Boss. Viewership for the series wasn’t sustainable to this degree, lowering with every new episode and eventually leveling out around 4 million. This is when the ultimate insult to the series happened, though, and perhaps one of the many reasons it was forgotten. Not only was the show cancelled before the first season ended, but NBC decided not to air the season/series finale on TV, instead prompting fans to watch it online if they wanted to see how it all ended.

It seems unthinkable for something like this to happen now, a move that especially feels like kicking a show while it’s down, but one thing the modern streaming era has pushed out is how TV shows used to get altered at the whims of the networks in wild ways. Shows used to routinely have their episode order shifted, putting narratives completely out of order, with major episodes not even airing on TV after a show got cancelled (both of which happened to Firefly). Perhaps the ultimate insult to The Cape is that a year later, Arrow would premiere on The CW and run for eight seasons, kickstarting an entire universe of superhero TV shows that were cut from the same cloth and which became beloved.

The Cape Gave Birth to Community’s Most Iconic Line

The ten-episode first season of The Cape ended incredibly abruptly in a rude move by NBC, but its influence actually gave way to an iconic meme. Weeks after The Cape had already been cancelled, Community premiered “Paradigms of Human Memory,” the twenty-first episode of Season 2, which was largely a parody of clip-show episodes, featuring mini-vignettes of the cast in micro moments that were never actually on screen (but were still hilarious). A recurring motif throughout these scenes is Abed (Danny Pudi) having an obsession with, you guessed it, The Cape.

Abed is shown in one scene with Troy waiting to watch the series premiere of The Cape, and in another dons a cape on his own and attempts to emulate the hero. As he flings his cape about and knocks Jeff’s cafeteria tray over, Joel McHale’s character yells out that the series will only “last three weeks,” prompting Abed to make a bold proclamation about The Cape‘s fate, replying: “Six seasons and a movie!” The irony in this moment, of course, is that The Cape had already been cancelled weeks before at this point, but Abed’s claim would live on.

Jokes at the expense of The Cape didn’t end with the fandom-obsessed rallying cry of “six seasons and a movie,” though, as Keith David would eventually appear on Community, only to be asked by Jeff if he had starred on The Cape (he replied, “No”). Furthermore, in Season 6, Abed meets a version of himself from an alternate universe, one where The Cape was on its third season at that point.

As Community would continue to thrive and its future would routinely become uncertain, the prospect of rallying around the show had a five-word battle cry for all fans: “Six seasons and a movie!” What’s especially hilarious about this is that so far…it’s worked. Community had a tumultuous life, with showrunner Dan Harmon being fired before Season 4, returning for Season 5, with the series being cancelled after that batch of episodes, only for Season 6 to get picked up on the now-defunct Yahoo Screen. Now, the feature film side of “Six seasons and a movie!” is the only piece of the puzzle missing, but it’s been ordered by Peacock and appears to be happening. Even after it’s released, any time a show gets cancelled, or ends before fans are ready, there will always be an immediate response, and it’s ironically rooted in a show everyone has forgotten about.