Community quickly learned to lean into “gimmick” episodes which could have been lame, but almost always ended up working like this Law and Order parody. Never will you be able to listen to Roxanne in the same way again. Over its six seasons, it captured the joy that comes from finding your people and how important it is to not only be there for each other, but to fight like hell to maintain these bonds because it's very hard to navigate this world alone. 1. Yahoo Screen wound up Peak TV’s first casualty, and the short-lived streaming service deserves a nice tombstone for producing Community’s humane final act. As the group is making a diorama of themselves making a diorama, Annie’s Boobs appears yet again, sparking a chain of events which leads to them finding his stash of stolen belongings (including Annie’s pen from Cooperative Calligraphy). 10.
Both episodes bring an era of Community to a fitting conclusion. Jeff loses an arm, Pierce gets fatally shot, Annie ends up in a mental institution, and Shirley is an alcoholic…all because Troy went to get the pizza. Community has landed in Netflix’s top 10 list this week, and old fans are rewatching it, and new fans are getting to know why everyone raves about it and why it’s spawned so many memes and inside jokes that are still passed around to this day. The start of the episode is narrated in a Lord of the Rings-style fashion, introducing the fantasy theme that shall surround the events to follow. Modern Warfare (1.23) This is the episode that introduced it all. © Copyright 2020 Meredith Corporation. But each of these spoofs and goofs had a purpose, rooted in character and plot. As they rifle through the pile of ephemera they begin to reminisce about events that have happened during the time they’ve known each other, good and bad, and arguments inevitably erupt. The prize? Lewis Jacobs/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images, Credit: The delivery man arrives at Troy and Abed’s housewarming party. Troy and Abed’s double-team pranks and schemes were a central element of the fun of Community, but this outshone them all — not least because nowhere else, not even in “Geothermal Escapism,” did their friendship ever come closer to a breaking point. Adam Rose/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images, Credit: Even if you’ve never seen the show, it should be apparent from this list that every Community episode is named after a fictional college class — but rarely do the episodes live up to their titles as much as this one. 8. The flashbacks featured in the episode are of the group’s past exploits, but not ones that the audience has seen before: the time they were put in an asylum, the time they filled in for glee club, the time they went to the ghost town…. Probably one of the most emotionally resonant episodes of the entire series, this is held up as an all-time classic in the entire comedy genre. The college is mapped in a fantasy table-top fashion and the sad tale of Neil begins. As a whole the episode reinforces the strength and friendship of the study group by showing that in fact they have a life together outside of the study room and aren’t just together because they have to be. On the one hand, there’s “Cooperative Polygraphy,” which sees a deceased Pierce trap the group in the study room and create discord with a ridiculous and hilarious polygraph test that thrust several violations of trust out into the sunlight. Conspiracy Theories and Interior Design is yet another example of Community taking a specific movie theme or genre – in this case, the conspiracy thriller – and making it into something completely new whilst keeping the parody intact. This is not an instance where Community is being mean to be kind, and that's what made it fun and stand out. With zombies, vampires and all forms of the undead coming into massive popularity over the past few years, it’s no surprise that Community included a zombie-themed episode in which the entire school is taken over by a deadly virus (hilariously to a soundtrack of ABBA and the Dean’s voice notes). It is yet another episode which deals with human relations and emotions, something Community deals with very well, and although this list seems full of those sorts of those episodes, they are the ones that will stand the test of time. The episode in which Jeff and Britta finally hooked up. Time to probably give it a chance, even if later seasons are generally not as well regarded as the earlier ones. Digital Estate Planning (Season 3) – 9.5: “The Study Group must help Pierce win a video game so that he can claim his inheritance, but somebody may be out to ensure that he loses.”. A friendly game of paintball goes awry as Jeff sleeps soundly away in his car, only to awaken to the signs of absolute chaos. Warrior Season 2 Episode 6 Review: To a Man with a Hammer, Everything Looks Like a Nail, Star Wars: The Mandalorian Season 2 Episode 2 Review – The Passenger, Supernatural Season 15 Episode 18 Review: Despair, Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here, Community season 3 episode 13 review: Digital Exploration Of Interior Design, Nintendo Holiday Gift Guide: Best Consoles and Games to Buy, Star Wars: The Mandalorian Season 2 Episode 1 Easter Eggs Explained, Give Comics Hope: Here's How You Can Help Save Comic Book Stores, Barbarians' True Story: the Battle of Teutoburg Forest, Arminius and Roman Defeat. On the other hand, though, if Instagram posts represent episodes of our life, then this episode gets at the fact that so much goes on in between each post that we never see.
A Fist Full of Paintballs/For a Few Paintballs More (Season 2) – 9.7: “When the study group learns that there's a sinister plot behind the paintball tournament, they unite the remaining players to defeat the enemy.”. NBC, Credit: Conspiracy Theories and Interior Design (Season 2) – 9.4: “Dean Pelton tries to bust Jeff for a phony night school credit, which only unveils a series of conspiracies, plots, and double-crosses between Jeff, Annie, and the dean.”. 2. At this point in Community’s run, we have all already heard of the character ‘Fat Neil’ (he’s appeared once before in Asian Population Studies) and few batted an eyelid at the less-than-kind nickname given to him by the characters. It’s also extremely self-aware, from the romantic montages scored by Sara Bareilles’ “Gravity,” to the fact that it climaxes with a classic Jeff Winger speech cobbled together from assorted moments that doesn’t make complete sense but still ends up being poignant and funny (“Harrison Ford is irradiating our testicles with microwave transmissions!” “There’s no such thing as a free Caesar salad!”).
Of course you can’t get a deadly zombie virus from eating toxic meat from a box of bad army surplus leftovers, but we still don’t want Abed to succumb to it. When Troy and Abed build their second big pillow fort, its prospect of breaking a Guinness World Record opens a chasm between the former, who wants to break the record by relying mostly on blankets to cover more ground, and the latter, who prefers comfort to achievement. It focuses on human emotion and the ties that hold the group together, but through a seemingly unimportant event, something that Community has come to do very well. Watching the episode with 2020 goggles, it’s also fascinating to see how it captures our relationship with social media, too. That alone makes this episode great and provides one of Donald Glover’s best performances yet. However, more importantly, Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking as a whole focuses on the weaknesses of the members of the study group and makes them altogether more human, less like characters of a TV show but more like people we as an audience can relate to. Watching those first three seasons, it truly felt like Harmon and company were taking full advantage their huge episode order. The season 1 finale necessarily dabbled in some love triangle shenanigans at its climax, but “Anthropology 101” had no use for that stuff. Basic Lupine Urology (Season 3) – 9.4: “Presented like an episode of Law & Order (1990), the study group attempts to find out who squashed their biology project: a yam.
Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. However, Pierce isn’t dying and the episode revolves around yet another plot to get his own way and force the group to argue amongst themselves. “Contemporary American Poultry” is one of the quintessential Community episodes. He shows emotions we haven’t seen yet that come from a place of hurt, rather than his usual choice of acting from a place of manipulation. Conspiracy Theories and Interior Design shows the ability of Community to take one simple theme and making it, for lack of a better word, different. But, as this is Community, things are done a little differently.
That’s where this came from. One of Community’s first full-blown concept episodes is one of its best. Jeff is conflicted about his feeling towards his absent father and Shirley is still unsure whether her friends are really her true friends. The splendidly ornate videogame graphics suggest Zelda on funroids, while the twisty father-son(s) saga conjures a lost era before fan rage when videogame culture could be mature, whimsical, and openhearted. The entire episode is a frenzy of groups from different areas of the school (glee club, roller skating junkies, the chess team) entering into an all-out battle, broken up by finally-resolved sexual tension between Jeff and Britta, and Mexican stand-offs.