Community on Yahoo: The 18 Episodes You Should Watch Before the Premiere
Pilot episodes are rarely great. With all the work of character and situation introduction, and actors still working out their characters, it generally takes a show a few episodes to find its groove. So skip the pilot. Jeff Winger is a lawyer who faked his undergrad degree and must now attend a community college full of losers, including one pretty but deeply weird blonde. Now you’re up to speed. "Advanced Criminal Law" is the first great episode of Community, opening up the possibility of a platonic Jeff and Britta while expanding the cast to include growing roles for Greendale’s three most important faculty members (Dean Pelton, Chang and John Oliver’s Professor Duncan). This episode also introduces Greendale’s pride in its most famous graduate, Luiz Guzman, and fantastic running joke character Leonard.
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If "Advanced Criminal Law" was the first great episode, Debate 109 is the show’s first perfect episode. When chronic overachiever Annie Edison (Alison Brie) needs a new partner for debate team, she ropes Jeff in to work his fine B.S. skills. When Jeff realizes he can’t wing his way (the show doesn’t even try to pretend his name isn’t symbolic) through debate, he actually applies himself for a jaw-dropping debate showdown. The show also found it could mix and match its pairings, with Britta and Pierce involved in the hypnotism plot and Abed, Troy and Shirley becoming convinced that Abed’s student films could predict the future. When all the plots come together at the end, it’s like Seinfeld at its best.
The episode is also be a stand out for Annie, while painting her into a corner. The show had cast her as a virginal overachieving teenager, but in real life the 27-year-old was rapidly becoming a pin-up favorite of the nerd crowd. Her electric chemistry with McHale made her a tempting love interest, but the 20-year age difference between their characters (if not the actors) made this matchup problematic. Annie, despite Brie’s considerable comedic gifts, would never really grow beyond “sexy, nerdy schoolgirl.” Of the cast, Brie is the only one that might have benefited from early cancellation.
As the first season drew to a close, Dan Harmon was just finding his rhythm. One of the recurring strategies the show would use to great effect (and diminishing returns) in later seasons was that socially awkward film student Abed (Danny Pudi) could only process the world through film references. As such, a simple plan by Jeff to monopolize the chicken finger supply in the cafeteria (the only edible thing there) becomes an elaborate, episode-long tribute to Goodfellas. While this approach has been used by countless modern shows, it was Community’s ability to let the parodies build naturally and never have them detract from the plot (until they did) that marked it as brilliant.
A lot of fans will tell you that this is the episode you should start with, but without knowing what an average episode looks like, a viewer would have no idea how absolutely insane this thing is. Also, it would spoil the clever Britta and Jeff resolution. Still, there’s no way you can talk about this show without its first truly ground breaking moment.
When hapless Dean Craig Pelton (the ever-game, Oscar-winning Jim Rash) announces a campus-wide paintball game, complete with a waaaayyyyyyyyyy too valuable reward, the entire campus turns into a war zone. The entire episode is a nonstop guffaw, as one action movie cliché is piled on top of another with gleeful abandon. Has to be seen to be believed.
The notion of a “bottle episode” has been around for nearly as long as television, and lots of good TV has come out of it. The idea is to lock all of your principle cast in a single setting for a contrived reason and comedy ensues. Of course, Community couldn’t do this type of episode without commenting on it. When tightly wound Annie can’t find her favorite pen, she accuses someone in the group of theft. The gang slowly comes unraveled as they tear the study room to pieces.
Spoiler: Turns out, in what is possibly a reference to The Murders in the Rue Morgue, that a monkey living in the air ducts did it…and that kinda makes sense.
If the show at this point could be accused of going too far into the meta world, this is the episode that pulled it back and showed that Harmon and company could produce a great half hour with no tricks. Donald Glover’s Troy Barnes was always the beating heart of the show. He was a wonderful combination of cocky, sweet, naïve, loyal, witty and also kinda dumb. When the gang takes him out to a bar to celebrate his 21st birthday, they go crazy and cut loose, but Troy finds that that’s just not him. When the night ends with Troy as the designated driver at his own party, the show gives us one of the most poignant scenes about the bittersweetness of growing up that’s ever been on TV.
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If "Mixology" was the show at its least gimmicky, this episode goes for broke in the other direction. The show often played with the question of Abed’s mental stability ... and sometimes went too far. When Abed goes into a Christmas-inspired catatonic state, the entire cast becomes stop motion animated in the style of the old Rankin/Bass holiday specials. The show has done some great Christmas (and Halloween) episodes, but this is the best of the lot for its laughs, it’s look and its heart.
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It’s one thing to make running jokes about Die Hard, Star Wars and Goodfellas, but table-top RPGs are a whole other level of nerdiness, and Harmon tackled it with both feet. In an effort to befriend a lonely and potentially suicidal fellow student, Jeff ropes the gang into playing D&D with “Fat Neil” (the big reveal is that Jeff gave him the nickname) despite the fact that none of them really know how to play. That they all get way too into it is a given (particularly, delightfully, Annie). That the show manages to wring so much from it is what makes Community remarkable.
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If someone says to you, “give me just one episode to watch”…this is a pretty good one, not because it’s the best (though it’s up there), but because it’s simple. Pierce, hospitalized for a minor procedure, calls in the gang and tells them he’s dying. He then proceeds to give them all “dying gifts,” which are ultimately designed to troll his alleged friends. Though the episode centers around the clash between Jeff and Pierce, it is Troy who steals the show. Allowed to spend an afternoon with his childhood hero, LeVar Burton, Troy is so overwhelmed that he locks into hilariously wordless horror, only broken when Burton leaves, at which point he breaks into a manic tantrum.
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As Community was so frequently a show about television, it often took it upon itself to take on some of the format’s more ridiculous tropes. In this episode, it took on the clipshow – a relic of the days when show runners would fulfill their contractual obligation to make 22 or 23 episodes a year by filling one of them with clips from other episodes, using some loose premise. “Hey, let’s look at the family album!”
Community’s clipshow features clips from episodes that never existed. They are entirely new scenes, and they serve as individual vignettes that tell a larger story about the study group. It's an experimental (for television) approach to storytelling and it works amazingly well.
It takes a great deal of courage to revisit your greatest success. Sequels are rarely as good, follow-ups are often disappointing, so it’s easy to paint (cough) the decision to return to the paintball plot as lazy. That the two-part episode surpasses its predecessor is indicative of exactly how fertile the show’s creative period was.
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A perfect example of the way the show's ensemble was its true secret weapon. Troy and Abed, now roommates in an off-campus apartment, invite the rest of the gang over for dinner and board games. When the pizza comes, they roll a die to decide who has to run downstairs and pick it up. Each scenario is then played out, allowing the show to illustrate what each member brings to the team by their absence. Some changes are minor. When Pierce leaves, the group gangs up on Shirley as “the old one.” When Troy leaves…things go much, much worse…
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Ken Burns's Civil War documentary may not spring to the top of list of “hip things to parody,” but it does provide a fantastic backdrop for another absurd story with real heart. Season 3 had dialed back on Pierce’s villainy only to replace it with Jeff’s ego as the most destructive force. Through it all, the friendship of Troy and Abed had become the show’s bedrock. Sooner or later, they had to experiment with what would happen when the two fought. As they both build competing, exceptionally elaborate pillow forts across campus, the cast takes sides in the bitter war.
By this point in the show’s run the genre parodies were strating to wear a little thin, but this Law & Order parody is simply sooo note perfect that you can’t not include it as one of the best episodes. “As you can see, by making a few adjustments, I can make the entire image... Old-West color!”
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Season 4 will always be the unloved stepchild due to Harmon’s lack of involvement. The show attempted, sometimes gamely, to be more earnest, but really the only episode that comes close to the heights of Seasons 2 or 3 is this tribute to Britta. In typical fashion, Britta confuses Sadie Hawkins with singer Sophie B. Hawkins. When Jeff calls her out on it, Britta insists that that is what she meant all along. That Sophie B. Hawkins eventually shows up isn’t really a surprise, but for the attention spent on one of the most unique characters on TV, this episode will do to represent the little-loved season.
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The return of Dan Harmon to the fold was in many ways like the return of an old friend. Almost immediately, the show felt like itself again (if not up to its Season 2 and 3 standards). This joy was somewhat tempered by Chevy Chase quitting and by Donald Glover announcing his departure. By having Pierce pass away off camera, the show was able to relive his glorious plot from “Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking,” having him give legitimate death gifts. But these came with the condition that each member of the group must submit to a polygraph. As with any situation in which friends are forced to be honest with one another, things get very ugly, very fast.
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While no one would begrudge John Oliver his success on Last Week Tonight, it is a shame that he will not be returning to Greendale. His Prof. Ian Duncan was often a wonderful foil for Jeff, and a piece of Greendale’s ever-expanding world that just seemed to fit. Taking a cue from Season 2’s “Mixology Certification,” this episode plays it mostly sincere (aside from a subplot involving Chang, maybe his funniest since Season 2). Duncan’s crush on Britta has often been played as unrequited and more than a little bit creepy, but having him rescue her at a point of extremely low self-esteem and then refusing to take advantage of her because he’s come to respect her as a human being made for an honestly heartfelt moment.
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Harmon again chose to revisit the scene of one his biggest successes, and while the results aren’t quite as glowing as the second turn at paintball, the second D&D episode never feels stale and is easily one of the highlights of the truncated fifth season. In an effort to reunite Jonathan Banks (now occupying the “cranky boomer” role) with his estranged son, the gang again tries to use D&D as a bridge. That Banks's son (a perfectly cast David Cross) has no interest in this reconciliation makes the game even more stressful, as scenarios designed to bring father and son closer together are now reassigned. Again, Alison Brie shows total commitment to the cause and Jim Rash (a later season MVP) manages to outdo her.
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