Justin Lubin/NBC
To love Community is to know anxiety. The sitcom just made it through five seasons after a series of eleventh-hour saves, only to be cancelled in May—on the brink of its sixth and final season. After two months of waning hopes, we learned last week that Yahoo Screen will produce and stream the sixth season this fall, which gives you the summer to catch up on this brilliant show or experience the magic anew.
Community is a slice-of-life-with-a-dash-of-surreal sitcom following a study group of varyingly lovable misfits at a community college in Colorado. There’s Jeff, the lawyer disbarred for his fake degree; Britta, an anarchist high-school dropout turned wannabe therapist; Shirley, a suburban mom; Pierce, a most-towlette baron turned student-for-life; Annie, an overachiever waylaid by pill addiction; Troy, a former high school football star who lost his athletic scholarship after a keg-flip injury; and Abed, an eccentric film student. While the surface setup is pretty typical college-sitcom, the execution is a whole other animal: deeply weird and frequently brilliant in ways not many shows touch.
If ever there was a show to binge-watch, it’s Community: the attention to detail, long-game gags, and slow-burn storytelling make marathons the ideal form for getting the most out of the series. Welcome to the darkest (and also prime) timeline.
Community
Number of Seasons: 5 (97 episodes, plus a handful of short webisodes)
Time Requirements: Community episodes are half an hour, which means if you make binge-watching a full-time job, you can knock out the whole show in about a week and a half. At a more reasonable pace of two episodes a night, you’ll get through it in seven weeks—so, just about a standard summer vacation.
Where to Get Your Fix: Hulu Plus
Best Character to Follow: Abed Nadir (Danny Pudi). While charismatic lawyer-turned-community-college-student Jeff Winger (Joel McHale) is technically Community’s protagonist, oddball film student Abed’s narrative savviness and dubious relationship with the fourth wall makes him an accessible and fairly global lens into the weird world of Greendale Community College. Other characters fade into the background, but even when Abed’s not the focus, he’s consistently interesting.
Seasons/Episodes You Can Skip:
Season 1: Episode 13, “Investigative Journalism” Look, most of these aren’t bad—they’re just not great, and the bar is pretty high. “Investigative Journalism,” in which Jeff takes over the school paper, is soundly OK.
Season 1: Episode 22, “The Art of Discourse” Jeff and Britta (Gillian Jacobs) face off against a gaggle of high-schoolers while Troy (Donald Glover) and Abed work their way down a checklist of classic college experiences. The whole thing reeks of trying too hard; it’s intensely uncomfortable and very, very skippable.
Season 1: Episode 25, “Pascal’s Triangle Revisited” After finding its voice halfway through the first season, Community reverts to lackluster love-triangle cliché for its first season finale. Again, it’s not terrible—but it should have been better.
Most of Season 4: Showrunner Dan Harmon was unceremoniously fired from Community after Season 3, and Season 4 suffers—badly—for his absence. For the most part it feels more like Community fanfiction than Community proper: there are some moments when it clicks, but the characters break down to one-note gags, and the cohesive voice of the rest of the show gets left by the wayside. It’s not (mostly) unwatchable—television that’s bad on the scale of Community still makes for a pretty solid sitcom—but if you’re looking to trim out about a sixth of your viewing in one cut, this is the season to skip.
Seasons and Episodes You Can’t Skip:
Season 1: Episode 10, “Environmental Science” You’re not watching this episode for the A-plot, in which the study group forces Jeff to befriend increasingly volatile Spanish professor Ben Chang in hopes of less homework. You’re not watching for the B-plot, in which a difficult biology experiment lays the groundwork for what’ll become the most enduring relationship of the show. You’re not even watching for the C-plot, in which Pierce (Chevy Chase) is a paradoxically good public-speaking coach for a nervous Shirley (Yvette Nicole Brown). No, you’re watching to get to the three-minute musical montage that resolves all three stories, set to an Irish traditional band cover of American Tale tearjerker “Somewhere Out There.” It’s the first episode where it becomes clear just how far from the beaten path Community is willing to go—and the gems to be found there.
Season 1: Episode 17, “Physical Education” “Physical Education” isn’t the best of Season 1. Story-wise, it’s pretty stock: the A-plot involves Jeff squaring off with a phys-ed coach who demands that clotheshorse Jeff play pool in regulation gym shorts, and the B-plot centers around the study group trying to coach Abed to ask a girl out. No, this episode is worth watching because, in the glorious escalation of Jeff and Coach Bogner’s final showdown, Community stops being a sitcom about a community college, and becomes Community. We’ve seen it dance close before, but this is the episode where it commits.
Season 1: Episode 21, “Contemporary American Poultry” Friendships and relationships are the core of Community, but something that rarely gets the column inches it deserves is how well the characters pair as mutual foils. “Contemporary American Poultry” is a study in social inversion—what happens when the usually-peripheral Abed ends up at the top of the social ladder, and cool-guy Jeff is left at the fringes. This isn’t the last time we’ll see Jeff and Abed playing off each other&mdsah;Season 2′s “Critical Film Studies” revisits the same juxtaposition—but it’s a fantastic bit of character drama; and because it’s Community, it’s a fantastic bit of character drama delivered via a mafia-movie riff about chicken fingers.
Season 1: Episode 23, “Modern Warfare” Season 1 of Community was quirky, but, for the most part, it stuck with its sitcom format, even when it was parodying other genres, like the mafia movie shout-outs of “Contemporary American Poultry.” Then there was “Modern Warfare,” a no-holds-barred homage to action flicks from Die Hard to Rambo to The Warriors. It’s a wild departure from the show so far, and testament to the show’s ability to range ridiculously far from its roots while still keeping its signature voice. For maximum impact, pretend this, not the lackluster “Pascal’s Triangle Revisited,” was the season finale.
Season 2: Episode 9, “Conspiracy Theories and Interior Design” One of this show’s greatest strengths is its ability to commit to weird, and run it way, way, way past its logical conclusion. So goes “Conspiracy Theories and Interior Design,” in which Jeff tries to get an easy credit by way of a fake independent study—taught by the imaginary Professor Professorson—only to have both the fictional professor suddenly appear, bringing with him a web of increasingly intricate intrigue; while in the B-plot, Troy and Abed build a blanket fort that rapidly expands into a sprawling city.
Season 2: Episode 11, “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” Community’s first holiday special (and the winner of the show’s first Emmy) is a stop-motion-animated homage to Rankin & Bass Christmas movies, complete with cautionary-tale musical numbers. It’s disturbing, bizarre, and genuinely poignant—one of the very rare holiday specials that manages to capture the complicated and often conflicted experience of holiday isolation.
Season 2: Episodes 23 and 24, “A Fistful of Paintballs” and “For a Few Paintballs More” Yes, they’ve done this before. Yes, you should still watch this two-parter, which makes its way from classic Western to Star Wars. “A Fistful of Paintballs” is by far and away the better of the two, but “For a Few Paintballs More” is still delightful.
Season 3: Episode 3, “Remedial Chaos Theory” This one is popularly considered to be the best episode of Community, and it’s unquestionably one of the tightest. If you hang out with Community fans, you’ll recognize an awful lot of the lines in this episode, including “Darkest Timeline,” which trended on Twitter as a hashtag after NBC canceled Community in May.
Season 3: Episode 13, “Digital Exploration of Interior Design” Think 1984, only instead of Winston and Julia, Britta and an anthropomorphic representation of the sandwich chain Subway. After being set up as a smart, funny foil to Jeff in Season 1, Britta got pretty consistently shafted for the rest of the show, and it’s nice to see her get a chance to shine—plus, “Digital Exploration of Interior Design” sets up the next episode.
Season 3: Episode 14, “Pillows and Blankets” Remember that time a 22-minute sitcom decided to completely ditch its standard format in favor of a pitch-perfect riff of the Ken Burns Civil War documentary series, but about a pillow fight? Because that definitely happened.
Season 3: Episode 22, “Introduction to Finality” The A-plots—Jeff’s moment of truth as he faces off against a former colleague, and Abed’s turn to the dark side—are OK, but Troy’s adventures in the cultish air-conditioning repair school (guest-starring John Goodman) are superlative.
Season 4: Episode 11, “Basic Human Anatomy” For the most part, Season 4 of Community is a disappointing slog. “Basic Human Anatomy” is a rare and lovely exception. Penned by Jim Rash, who plays the flamboyant Dean Pelton, it mostly centers around Troy and Abed staging a Freaky Friday-style body-swap. It’s sweet, charming, and funny—and it actually feels like a Community episode.
Season 5: Episode 5, “Geothermal Escapism” “Geothermal Escapism” is roughly in the spirit of the paintball episodes, but set around a school-wide game of “The Floor Is Lava”—Abed’s farewell gift to Troy, who’s leaving Greendale so that Donald Glover can pursue a music career to sail around the world and find his destiny. It’s a well-staged episode, and a worthy—and wrenching—farewell to a character who’s very much the series’ heart. If you don’t at least tear up, you are a monster.
Best Scene—The “Somewhere Out There” Montage from “Environmental Science”:
Whoever thought two dudes singing to a lab rat while someone gave a speech about brownies and an estranged couple salsa-danced to an Irish trad Green Day cover band could be this inspiring?
The Takeaway:
If you have to choose between Dan Harmon and Chevy Chase, always pick Dan Harmon.
If You Liked Community You’ll Love:
For the same kind of suburban surrealism and sweet strangeness, dig up the old Nickelodeon series The Adventures of Pete and Pete. (Only the first two seasons are available on DVD, but it’s possible to find the third via less official channels if you look hard enough.) If you’re after a more traditional sitcom in the same loose vein, Parks and Recreation has a lot of fan overlap—but Community is and always will be a unique beast.
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