If you want to know the truth of something, there are steps to ensure you find it and recognize it when you see it. Without a method, you risk coming to the wrong conclusion. Without a through process, your chances of convincing someone else are weak. One sort of method involves these six steps:

1. Frame the question clearly

2. Define the terms

3. Acknowledge your presumptions and biases

4. Gather all the evidence you can

5. Assess the evidence by some strict and appropriate method

6. After you know what is true, look for an explanation

To show how the method works in practice, let’s apply it to the question, “Is Britta the worst?” Britta is Britta Perry from the comedy TV series “Community.” It is not the most important question, but the theory that Britta is the worst is a valid theory to test.

I don’t watch much television, and when I first heard about Community, I wasn’t interested. But my daughters said, “Dad, just watch this scene.” A minute later I said, “OK, I’m really into this!” The brilliant parody of the Clint Eastwood spaghetti western genre that pulled me in is here in this link.

The premise of Community, in less than 10 words, is: Seven college students form a study group; hijinks ensue. Each episode is a new excuse for a wacky display of the characters’ personal oddities, or a clever homage to a popular film or television genre. If you look close, every episode in the six-year series contains one or more references. Episodes of Community parody Saturday morning cartoons, zombie movies, TV detective procedurals, claymation Christmas specials, 8-bit video games, and more. There is a bottle episode that subverts the concept by destroying the set, and a clip show that subverts the concept by recalling events that never happened. It’s all remarkably clever.

Britta Perry is a member of the study group and one of the main characters in Community. In the beginning she’s the cute blond that main star Jeff wants to get with. But she’s too cool for him. Her first words are a chilling, “Don’t hit on me, OK?”

But Britta’s character changes. She becomes a bumbler. By season 3 her name is a verb meaning “make a mistake.” Characters say, “You’re the worst” to Britta’s face. A lot! Hating on Britta is one of the recurring tropes of the show.

But being the butt of jokes and the subject of criticism doesn’t make Britta the worst. It makes her a victim. To find if she is, indeed, the worst, we need to follow the method. Here, again, are the steps to answer the question meaningfully and methodically.

Frame the question clearly

Britta is a fictional character. She shouldn’t be judged by real-world standards. She should be compared with other characters in Community. Admissible evidence can be gathered from the episodes of the show, or from interviews with the actors or the show’s creator, Dan Harmon.

There is a second way to frame the question. Art exists to be interpreted. The meaning of any art is partly what the creator intends and partly what the audience makes of it. I’m not saying that all interpretations are valid. A lot of opinions are ignorant and wrong. But Britta is there to be seen by a million different people with a million different experiences and perspectives.

Define the terms

To be the worst is to be less capable or less virtuous than others. We can insist on that. Even before we establish what the criterion is, we can insist that worst means not as good at something as other people or compared to some measure.

Someone can be generally and consistently bad at everything, but they might also be the worst because of just one deficiency. Shaquille O’Neal was a standout basketball player in the NBA for years, despite being the league’s worst free throw shooter.

Where Britta is concerned, we need to consider whether she is the worst person in the world, or just the worst at Greendale. Community is a comedy where everything — zombie carnage and slasher murder included — is played for humor. So nothing very bad happens and nobody is very bad. We’re looking for a pretty mild sort of worst here.

Establishing the definition is especially important when the term is vague. If the allegation were, say, “Britta is the tallest,” the theory could be proven or disproved with a measuring tape. But there is no definite, agreed-upon way to measure the worst. To be thorough and open-minded we must look for any behavior that Britta engages in more than any other character. And there is one.

Britta is aggressively political and militant. She ties everything to social and political issues. She’s prone to grand declarations of principle, such as, “If loving worms is stupid, I don’t want to be smart!” She thrusts her fist in the air more than any other character. But her calls to action often fall flat.

Acknowledge your presumptions and biases

I like Britta better than any other character on the show.. I identify with her. I like impassioned argument and strong conviction. I don’t think social concern is laughable, or boring. I mispronounce “bagel,” though I do it differently than Britta does. None this prevents me from making a fair judgement. But it does alert me that I need to be objective.

Gather all the evidence you can

Whenever it is possible, you should gather all the evidence relevant to the question. That isn’t always possible. Sometimes an exhaustive search for evidence would take too much time or cost too much. Political polls and other types of surveys suffice with a small sample of the population because asking everyone would take too long.

But watching Community is enjoyable. I’ve watched all 110 episodes several times each. I’ve placed a precis of each episode here, briefly summarizing what happens, pointing to “the worst” action or behavior in that episode and taking special note of what Britta does.

Assess the evidence by some strict and appropriate method

During the assessment phase it is vital to look for an overwhelming preponderance of evidence to support a theory. In ordinary conversation people often insist a thing is true if it happened once. If they had a pleasant chat with a French person one time, or they crossed paths with a pit bull that didn’t bite them one time, they might insist that French people in general are nice and pit bulls are always gentle. Scientific research abides by a much higher standard. Unless something is true in an overwhelming majority of cases, a good researcher won’t draw any conclusion.

There is plenty of (comically) bad behavior in Community. Some of it is quite strident. Consider:

• Annie throws childish tantrums when she loses her pen, and when she thinks she’s losing the Mock UN.

• Chang lives in the air ducts and tries to blow up the school.

• Jeff attacks the study table with a fire axe.

• Shirley is kind and virtuous, except for all the times she isn’t.

• Cornelius Hawthorne is a bigot and a bad father.

• Pierce is rude, selfish, clueless and racist.

• Troy names his monkey . . .well, you know what he names it.

• Terrible Dean Craig Pelton keeps the school’s academic records in a Microsoft Paint file.

• Leonard’s answer to everything is a raspberry.

• Garrett lives in a constant state of panic. If it’s not the ass-crack bandit that sets him off, it’s an avalanche of frisbees.

• Starburns (his name is Alex) steals supplies from the science lab to start a meth lab, fakes his death, and tries to solve climate change by inventing the cat car.

In this environment, Britta is far from the worst by most measures. She is never dangerous or destructive. She is sometimes petulant, but not more than Annie or Shirley. She makes mistakes (i.e, coming to the first day of Biology class with a Chemistry textbook), but not sillier mistakes than Troy. Britta performs badly in her tap dance recital and again at the Christmas Show. But that second one has a good effect — breaking the Glee Club’s grip on the school before Mr. Rad takes Greendale to Regionals.

Britta is not the best. She’s not as wholesome as Todd, nor as gifted as Rich. But not being the best doesn’t make someone the worst.

Focusing on moments in the show when characters call Britta the worst, we find cases when Britta is made to suffer for others’ mistakes. Troy and Abed complain that Britta is falsely accusing their new Eastern European friend Lukka because she’s jealous. When they discover Lukka is an ethnic-cleansing mass murderer, just as Britta said he was, they get mad at her all over again for failing to warn them about Lukka’s creepiness sooner. Another time, Jeff mutters, “Britta’s the worst!",” as he realizes that her advice about confronting his father is the right thing to do. Yet again, Vaughn celebrates Britta’s terribleness in song in front of the whole Greendale campus because he thinks she shared a poem he wrote to her. In fact it was Jeff who poached the poem. Britta was innocent.

After a lengthy review, we see that Britta is not the worst in terms of behavior. Her mistakes and misconduct are not more harmful nor more frequent than those of other characters. But we can’t be content to say, “No, she isn’t.” Her status as the worst serves a purpose within the show. With a little more effort we can discover what that purpose is.

After you know what is true, look for an explanation

Community began, like most television shows, as a single pilot episode. Writer Dan Harmon tried to convince network executives with one short script that Community had the potential to be consistently funny week after week. But the story lines were not complete and the characters were not developed.

Each of the ensemble cast’s seven main characters (and tertiary characters like Ben Chang and Dean Craig Pelton) arrived in the pilot fundamentally unfinished. And each of them evolved over time, in some cases sharpening creator Dan Harmon and the writing staff’s original assumptions or defying them. No character, however, changed more from conception to execution over time than Britta Perry as played by Gillian Jacobs. 

Harmon knew where he wanted to take most of the characters. Jeff would be the group’s suave leader and deliver motivational speeches. Abed would inject pop culture references and meta perspectives. Harmon put a great deal of himself in Abed. Shirley would be the most mercurial character, with sudden switches from light to dark and many shocking “Big Cheddar” reveals. Pierce would be awkward, out of sync, and just plain old.

Harmon didn’t know what to do with Britta. In the pilot, Britta existed to lure Jeff into the study group. But after the pilot she couldn’t go on just being the unattained object of Jeff’s desire. She needed to carry her comedic weight. A blogger named Matthew gets it exactly right in a 2016 article:

Britta was an incredibly smart person in the beginning before getting dumber so she could be laughed at.

Britta became error-prone and irritating. In part, the change happened because some of the writers didn’t like Britta and wanted to see her humiliated. Also, actor Gillian Jacobs enjoys goofiness and was eager to take her character in that direction. Matthew again, explains how the creative process was unfair to Britta:

I realized that she is one of those characters who almost never seem to be rewarded by the narrative. In fact, the writing makes her look bad purposefully, even in episodes where she is ‘the worst’ for 19 minutes and in the last one she becomes ‘the best’. While she is described sometimes as the “dark cloud that unites the group” or the “heart of the group”, her friends are constantly putting her down in ways that honestly are incredibly hurtful. Troy, the same character who’d come to date her, said “you’re like a fun vampire, except that you don’t suck blood – you just suck”. And why? Because the liberal activist is the butt of the joke, of course.

The point is: for some reason, Britta was never allowed to make mistakes by her peers, but of course she made them – she is human. Soon, they started using her name as a metaphor for doing the wrong thing (“you brittaed it”/” Call this off before it becomes a full-scale `Brittastrophe`.”). She only did the wrong things because the narrative dumbed her down to the point where there’s literally no justification as to why she would make some mistakes.

B.D. Hall, writing for Slate, has another perspective, suggesting that Britta is despised because she’s the most realistic and honestly depicted character.

While the other characters can be viewed and mocked from a distance, Britta’s failings feel like our own. Her struggles between right and wrong, selflessness and selfishness, aloof detachment and petty jealousy are all too familiar—and the contempt she engenders can, for the viewer, feel almost personal. I can’t blame the writers for wanting to reestablish that Jeff, the selfish liar, is actually “the worst,” as opposed to Britta, whose biggest problem at Greendale Community College seems to be her humanity in a school of caricatures.

Another blogger, Deborah Pless, contends that Britta’s character ultimately achieves more for the cause of equality by being flawed than she would by being competent.

When men write about women, as they typically do in Hollywood, because there are so few commercially successful female writers (Grr. Arrgh.), they write about them as "others." Men, they give foibles and character traits that they themselves understand, because they can relate to men. Women, though, are so foreign and different, that men are reduced to giving them the flaw of clumsiness and a weakness for shopping. The key, Harmon explained, is to treat women like people. Not as objects or icons, but just normal people with normal flaws. Britta says bagel wrong because Harmon says bagel wrong. Once you're able to view female characters as normal people with completely normal, fleshed out flaws, you'll be a lot closer to having a story that is good and true.

My friend Edward, after reading this essay, said that I missed a key element. He says that viewers see themselves in Britta, and laugh at her for doing things that were horrible when they did them themselves. Britta is the worst in us all.

Britta's character embodies many of the characteristics most people exhibit at one point or another, in either adolescence or young adulthood. These are the characteristics that later on in life you look back on and cringe. She is arrogant about her opinions while being ignorant at the same time (i.e. youth). Britta is "the worst" because she reminds us of "the worst" parts of us that, thank God, we outgrew.

So here’s the outcome of an epistemologically sound assessment of Britta. She is definitely not the worst in any conventional sense of the word. She commits the worst faux pas in a few episodes, but not so many as other characters. She is mostly harmless and she gets more than her share of grief from others.

But Britta serves a function in the show that the writers, actors, and viewers all agree to encapsulated in the words “the worst.” She embody the viewers’ own youthful errors. She exemplifies real-life women (“[W]ho doesn’t just not wear underwear because Oprah said it would spice things up, but because she hasn’t done laundry in three weeks!”)

She is the worst because mankind need not be governed and because there is no formula for people. She is the worst because, even though a person shouldn’t have to have mustard on their face for things to make sense, the world will always need someone willing to wear the mustard when something needs to be said.

Dah Doy.

Some readers probably ask, “Wasn’t this making too big a deal about something unimportant?” I say “No.” Because applying fair judgement to every question is what we need to do as a matter of habit. Characters on a TV show aren’t not important, but fair judgement is.

Fairmindedness is a discipline. You either have the habit or you don’t. Anyone who can say, “It doesn’t matter. It’s just a TV show,” might also say, “It doesn’t matter. They’re just children in cages.”