Paul's favourite Community episodes
When I can't sleep, I make lists, so in honour of Community's worst-ever episode this week, I thought I'd list my five favourite episodes of the show. I'm sorry there's no showing from season 1 here, but "Romantic Expressionism," the show's first great episode, is my #6.
5. "Paradigms of Human Memory" (Season 2, Episode 21)
"Paradigms" doesn't have much of a story to it, but that's to its benefit, since it would just get in the way of one of the most incessantly funny sitcom episodes ever made. The episode uses the fake clip show premise to deliver joke after joke, nonstop, with almost all of them rooted in the characters and very few falling flat. It represents the show at its silliest and most self-referential (it's essentially an episode about Community as a series), but also at its most layered. No segment displays all three better than the fanvid parody, set to Sara Bareilles' treacly "Gravity," that follows Annie's overestimation of her relationship with Jeff. Already every clip included is funny on its own, and a few are also callbacks to previous clips in the episode. But as a whole, the sequence is a pitch-perfect parody of the visual grammar of fanvids, with a liberal use of slow-motion and some edited-in reaction shots (the black-and-white insert of Troy looking displeased never fails to make me burst into laughter). It also serves as a dig at fanvid creators, who will read into the slightest actions (Jeff glancing at Annie in line at the cafeteria, or giving her the heimlich maneuver when she's choking) in service of their one true pairing. Above all, however, it's a dig at Dan Harmon himself, whose fans want the characters to just get together while they're instead on a show which forces them to fight runaway robots and have jumprope competitions. And that's not even mentioning the layered timelines of the clips themselves: when a final nonsensical Winger speech stitched together from ten separate fake episodes and complete with callbacks and self-commentary brings the group back together yet again, it's hard not to wonder how a show this elaborate could ever make it to network TV.
4. "Remedial Chaos Theory" (Season 3, Episode 3)
"Chaos" is an easy consensus pick for the best Community episode, and it's easy to see why: it uses an elaborate time-travel gimmick to make incisive observations about its characters, and it does it in a very funny way. If I seem to be damning it with faint praise, it's because the episode doesn't quite hold up to repeated viewings. It's as tightly constructed as a story with this structure could be, but telling a seven-part story may be just a touch too large-scale for a twenty-minute episode. While I do love it to death, and few other sitcoms could even attempt an episode like this, the end result is an episode that builds to something great, but requires a lot of setup to get there. As a result, a few characters' storylines get lost in the shuffle, and the episode occasionally feels overstuffed. But what payoffs those last few timelines are, and what a great encapsulation of everything that makes the show great this episode is. "Chaos" could've made a wonderful series finale, if it hadn't also been cleverly (and subtly) building long-term plotlines for the rest of the season. This is, by far, Community at its most ambitious.
3. "Critical Film Studies" (Season 2, Episode 19)
While most of Community's theme episodes are easily graspable, "Critical Film Studies" may be the most alienating and least accessible episode the show's ever done, even as it's as warm and loving as the show's other great episodes. It hinges on a four-minute monologue about Cougar Town, a similarly low-rated series not even on the same network, then closes with a mournful montage of the characters demurely recreating scenes from Pulp Fiction under Erik Satie's first "Gymnopédie." It's probably the most affecting sequence the show ever managed, at once heartbreaking and deeply funny; it's the show at its most distinctive, and that goes for the whole episode as well. On what other sitcom could you find a full-episode parody of one movie masquerading as a parody of another movie, only to combine the two seamlessly by the end, having told a touching story about a difficult friendship in the meantime? If nothing else, this is Community's contribution to sitcom history, a great example of just how far an episode of network television can go.
2. "Cooperative Calligraphy" (Season 2, Episode 8)
"Calligraphy" is objectively the best episode Community ever made, and ever will make. It's the show distilled to its very essence, a bottle episode that confines the characters to one room and has them bounce off one another for the entire running time. It's also the show at its absolute rawest, taking the characters further into conflict than they ever had been before or since. By episode's end, all the characters are stripped down emotionally and physically, but the plotting is so elegant and subtle that you barely notice it all started with Annie losing her pen. While certain characters may have had better showings in episodes where they were the main focus, "Calligraphy" is the one to best balance the seven of them, with everyone being sympathetic and fully-realized, as well as getting a good share of the jokes. And of course, it's got the best act break in all of Community, with "Gwynnifer, hi, yeah, it's me. I can't make it. Well, tell your disappointment to suck it, I'm doing a bottle episode!" standing as one of its best-ever lines that doesn't work at all out of context. If "Critical Film Studies" showed just how singular a sitcom episode could be, "Cooperative Calligraphy" shows that the most "normal" episodes can also be the most powerful.
1. "Mixology Certification" (Season 2, Episode 10)
I love that Community is a show that comments on itself, and self-criticizes, and self-references. But at the end of the day, my favourite episode is the one that's the most universal. I already wrote a lot about it, but suffice it to say that "Mixology" tells a series of honest, human stories, and without any of the bells and whistles that Community often uses to accomplish that. It's a minimalist episode of television, if that's possible to be, simple and easily grasped throughout, but constantly saying something larger about the way we live with each other. Community's title was a deliberate choice, and never is that more obvious than here.
5. "Paradigms of Human Memory" (Season 2, Episode 21)
"Paradigms" doesn't have much of a story to it, but that's to its benefit, since it would just get in the way of one of the most incessantly funny sitcom episodes ever made. The episode uses the fake clip show premise to deliver joke after joke, nonstop, with almost all of them rooted in the characters and very few falling flat. It represents the show at its silliest and most self-referential (it's essentially an episode about Community as a series), but also at its most layered. No segment displays all three better than the fanvid parody, set to Sara Bareilles' treacly "Gravity," that follows Annie's overestimation of her relationship with Jeff. Already every clip included is funny on its own, and a few are also callbacks to previous clips in the episode. But as a whole, the sequence is a pitch-perfect parody of the visual grammar of fanvids, with a liberal use of slow-motion and some edited-in reaction shots (the black-and-white insert of Troy looking displeased never fails to make me burst into laughter). It also serves as a dig at fanvid creators, who will read into the slightest actions (Jeff glancing at Annie in line at the cafeteria, or giving her the heimlich maneuver when she's choking) in service of their one true pairing. Above all, however, it's a dig at Dan Harmon himself, whose fans want the characters to just get together while they're instead on a show which forces them to fight runaway robots and have jumprope competitions. And that's not even mentioning the layered timelines of the clips themselves: when a final nonsensical Winger speech stitched together from ten separate fake episodes and complete with callbacks and self-commentary brings the group back together yet again, it's hard not to wonder how a show this elaborate could ever make it to network TV.
4. "Remedial Chaos Theory" (Season 3, Episode 3)
"Chaos" is an easy consensus pick for the best Community episode, and it's easy to see why: it uses an elaborate time-travel gimmick to make incisive observations about its characters, and it does it in a very funny way. If I seem to be damning it with faint praise, it's because the episode doesn't quite hold up to repeated viewings. It's as tightly constructed as a story with this structure could be, but telling a seven-part story may be just a touch too large-scale for a twenty-minute episode. While I do love it to death, and few other sitcoms could even attempt an episode like this, the end result is an episode that builds to something great, but requires a lot of setup to get there. As a result, a few characters' storylines get lost in the shuffle, and the episode occasionally feels overstuffed. But what payoffs those last few timelines are, and what a great encapsulation of everything that makes the show great this episode is. "Chaos" could've made a wonderful series finale, if it hadn't also been cleverly (and subtly) building long-term plotlines for the rest of the season. This is, by far, Community at its most ambitious.
3. "Critical Film Studies" (Season 2, Episode 19)
While most of Community's theme episodes are easily graspable, "Critical Film Studies" may be the most alienating and least accessible episode the show's ever done, even as it's as warm and loving as the show's other great episodes. It hinges on a four-minute monologue about Cougar Town, a similarly low-rated series not even on the same network, then closes with a mournful montage of the characters demurely recreating scenes from Pulp Fiction under Erik Satie's first "Gymnopédie." It's probably the most affecting sequence the show ever managed, at once heartbreaking and deeply funny; it's the show at its most distinctive, and that goes for the whole episode as well. On what other sitcom could you find a full-episode parody of one movie masquerading as a parody of another movie, only to combine the two seamlessly by the end, having told a touching story about a difficult friendship in the meantime? If nothing else, this is Community's contribution to sitcom history, a great example of just how far an episode of network television can go.
2. "Cooperative Calligraphy" (Season 2, Episode 8)
"Calligraphy" is objectively the best episode Community ever made, and ever will make. It's the show distilled to its very essence, a bottle episode that confines the characters to one room and has them bounce off one another for the entire running time. It's also the show at its absolute rawest, taking the characters further into conflict than they ever had been before or since. By episode's end, all the characters are stripped down emotionally and physically, but the plotting is so elegant and subtle that you barely notice it all started with Annie losing her pen. While certain characters may have had better showings in episodes where they were the main focus, "Calligraphy" is the one to best balance the seven of them, with everyone being sympathetic and fully-realized, as well as getting a good share of the jokes. And of course, it's got the best act break in all of Community, with "Gwynnifer, hi, yeah, it's me. I can't make it. Well, tell your disappointment to suck it, I'm doing a bottle episode!" standing as one of its best-ever lines that doesn't work at all out of context. If "Critical Film Studies" showed just how singular a sitcom episode could be, "Cooperative Calligraphy" shows that the most "normal" episodes can also be the most powerful.
1. "Mixology Certification" (Season 2, Episode 10)
I love that Community is a show that comments on itself, and self-criticizes, and self-references. But at the end of the day, my favourite episode is the one that's the most universal. I already wrote a lot about it, but suffice it to say that "Mixology" tells a series of honest, human stories, and without any of the bells and whistles that Community often uses to accomplish that. It's a minimalist episode of television, if that's possible to be, simple and easily grasped throughout, but constantly saying something larger about the way we live with each other. Community's title was a deliberate choice, and never is that more obvious than here.