streets ahead: the best community episodes

We recently finished a rewatch of Community, which was the first time I'd rewatched the final two seasons. We wound up skipping most of season four -- we didn't intend to originally, but binging it really drove home how off it was in tone, and after a few episodes we were just eager to move on.

There are so few comedies that hold up to multiple viewings while still being funny. Among 21st century shows, Community is up there with Curb, Arrested Development, and Happy Endings in this respect (maybe Wet Hot American Summer too), as well as in how strong and distinct its voice is -- which is exactly why season four stands out. If season four was all that existed, it would be a solid show, well-written, great actors. But you can't do Arrested Development without Mitch Hurwitz; you can't do Community without Dan Harmon. Losing half the cast by season six, when Pierce, Shirley, and Troy had all left for one reason or another, affects the basic core Community-ness of the show less than losing Harmon for a year did. (Of course, you could argue that the three characters most vital to that Community-ness were among the four who remained, but I don't think that dilutes my point.)

We owe Community's existence in large part to an era of diminished expectations and desperation at NBC, which also gave us Parks, Friday Night Lights (once DirecTV chipped in), and Chuck, all shows that performed pretty poorly in the ratings but not poorly enough to trump the value of their established audience vs. the risks of putting new shows on in their place, because hardly anything was prospering on NBC, so there was no real standard of performance other series had to measure up to.

I think I said when the sixth season was on that Britta was my favorite character, which remains true in rewatching. She may be my favorite sitcom character of all time -- she's certainly up there with Taxi's Reverend Jim, WKRP's Dr Johnny Fever, and Soap's Burt Campbell. The development of Britta parallels the course of the show, in a lot of ways: she is least distinct in the early days of the show, when it's a funny, well-written sitcom in which many of the characters are not fully in focus yet (Troy and Annie are fairly insubstantial sketches, Britta is primarily the hot girl Jeff wants to impress and/or fool, and is overall more serious). Jeff is Jeff from day one. He grows, sure, but in the way that all sitcom characters in his situation grow: he becomes less of an asshole to people he has come to know better. Abed, similarly, is pretty much Abed right away, becoming more nuanced over time, but not in a way that makes his early episodes seem out of character. Britta is the one who doesn't just become more flawed over time, but flawed in ways that become the main way other people characterize her ("Britta is the worst," "The AT&T of people"), with her "I lived in New York," her empty and performative activism, her ambitions to become a therapist. But she also becomes goofier, with more physical comedy and weird tics that are perfectly consistent -- it somehow makes more sense for Britta to be the one who says "baggle" than anyone else, for Britta to have a carnie ex-boyfriend and parents played by Martin Mull and Lesley Ann Warren.

Dean Pelton is the only one who goes through quite the same level of development -- at least successfully, since Chang is used for different purposes in different seasons. In Chang's case it turns him into an unwieldy, unwriteable cartoon, but the Dean becomes both broader and more human.

Anyway, I couldn't resist making a quick list of my favorite episodes. They are in chronological, not ranked, order.

Spanish 101 (season 1, episode 2)

This was one of the great things about rewatching Community: one of the best episodes is the second episode. No, the series hasn't come fully into focus yet, especially when it comes to Troy, Britta, and Annie. But early Chang is probably still the best incarnation of Chang, who becomes not just cartoonish but an active nuisance later in the series and goes through multiple periods in which he is weirdly infantilized. While Dean Pelton -- my second favorite character after Britta -- becomes more interesting and more funny as time goes on, Chang was best as a minor supporting character. What makes this episode is the Jeff/Pierce relationship -- which would always be at its best when played like this, with Pierce's hero-worship of Jeff (and later, Jeff's realization that he will some day be as uncool as Pierce).

Contemporary American Poultry (season 1, episode 21)

After toying with tropes and the characters' awareness of tropes in subplots, this is Community's first full-on homage episode, riffing on Goodfellas in a story about the corruption that comes with power over the cafeteria's chicken fingers.

Modern Warfare (season 1, episode 23)

The first paintball episode probably remains the best, but this episode gets bonus points for the fact that even its sequels were pretty fantastic -- there were absolutely diminishing returns in the paintball episodes over the course of the series, but when you start with such a high point, it takes a while before those diminishing returns bring you low.

Epidemiology (season 2, episode 6)

The zombie episode! Brilliant all the way through, but especially in its use of the cat scare, and of Jeff's ridiculous vanity.

Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (season 2, episode 14)

The fact that Community has two D&D episodes, both of which are good, when the show isn't a show about nerds or geeks like The Big Bang Theory or something ... is ridiculous. The first one is the best of them, both for the way it fits with the season's ongoing character arcs and for Alison Brie's miming, but if the first one didn't exist the second one would be on this list.

Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking (season 2, episode 16)

Out of all the main characters, Pierce-focused and Shirley-focused episodes are the rarest (depending on how you count "Troy and Abed" episodes). Most of them are not among the show's best -- Harmon doesn't seem to have had much of a handle on Shirley (her best scenes are rarely those in which she is the main character of the story, unfortunately), whereas with Pierce, the problem was the opposite. He seems to have understood the character perfectly well -- and made him so petty and unlikeable that, like Chang later, it's often difficult to understand his presence in the show or among these people. This episode is one of two that revolve around Pierce giving everyone a gift with ulterior motives -- and while he is no less petty here than usual, the format is a good occasion to explore his relationship to and impressions of each of the other characters. This leads to some great stuff -- Troy's panic is the most obvious, but Britta's ethical dilemma over Pierce's check is classic too.

Critical Film Studies (season 2, episode 19)

The Pulp Fiction/My Dinner With Andre episode. I mean, what more can you say? It's pitch-perfect, from the choice of those two particular movies (can you think of two indie movies that are less alike, while at the same time both being renowned for their talkiness?) to the continuation of Abed's Cougartown fandom.

Paradigms of Human Memory (season 2, episode 21)

The back half of second season really demonstrates Community's brilliance, and of course the stuff that would make it so divisive. This is a clip show in which all the clips are from study group adventures we haven't seen. It's such a brilliant concept that it's amazing it hasn't been used frequently enough for us to have been sick of it by the time this episode aired, but I can't think of a live-action show that had done it before.

Remedial Chaos Theory (season 3, episode 3)

The episode that introduces the darkest timeline, but there are so many other great moments apart from that, the best of which might be the realization that the happiest timeline is the one where Jeff leaves the room and his absence leads to everyone else feeling happier and more relaxed.

Digital Estate Planning (season 3, episode 20)

The eight-bit episode, which would be on this list even if only for Annie and Shirley's murder spree, but which also features Abed's eight-bit girlfriend.

App Development and Condiments (season 5, episode 8)

Because Harmon never developed Shirley as deeply as some of the others, her religious self-righteousness that was established early on -- and somehow never goes away even as she's fleshed out more and humanized -- is good fodder for episodes like this one, which positions her as an antagonist. Plus, hey, Mitch Hurwitz as Koogler.

Basic Crisis Room Decorum (season 6, episode 3)

The best parts of season 6 are the Britta parts, as she reaches her final evolution as a ridiculous goof. Basic Crisis Room Decorum features Britta shitting her pants and running around in panic, and the first mention of 90s alternative band Natalie is Freezing. This episode is so much better than I make it sound.

Queer Studies and Advanced Waxing (season 6, episode 4)

Dean Pelton's sexuality is front and center, and actually thoughtfully handled in Community's own weird way, rising above making him the butt of a joke about it.

Honorable mentions:

Comparative Religion (season 1, episode 12). It's not quite in the upper echelon, but major bonus points for Anthony Michael Hall (who I wish had returned) and the holiday brawl.

Physical Education (season 1, episode 17). The billiards episode, which features some of first season's best moments of physical comedy.

Aerodynamics of Gender (season 2, episode 7). The mean girls subplot isn't good enough to make this one of the very best episodes, but the transcendent trampoline with its racist guardian is fantastic.

Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas (season 2, episode 11). The stop-motion is terrific, but the novelty wears off on re-watches, and the writing isn't as strong as the novelty.

Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps (season 3, episode 5). The Halloween anthology episode -- a little uneven by Community standards, but certainly great.

Studies in Modern Movement (season 3, episode 7). I don't know what episode better shows how much Troy's character was developed from the beginning of season 1, when he was the ex-jock Annie had a crush on; here he's Abed's childlike playmate, the two of them a couple of Oscars to Annie's Felix. The Dean/Jeff subplot is pretty great.

Introduction to Teaching (season 5, episode 2). Invaluable for Abed's Nic Cage, if nothing else.

Emotional Consequences of Broadcast Television (season 6, episode 13). The Community finale is also one of its most meta episodes, but suffers from the lack of half of its original cast.

emmy ballot

There is something about being a fan of a particular medium that makes some of us compulsive list-makers, right? Our desert island discs (Carried to Dust, Everywhere at Once, Challengers, In the Wee Small Hours...) and books (Little Big, House of Leaves, The Talisman, Swamp Thing...), top ten lists every year, and so on. I have to admit, when I first thought of doing this TV blog, one of the things I thought of was Sepinwall's annual "if I had an Emmys ballot" post.

Well, voting for Emmy nominations closed last week. Who would I have nominated?

Comedy

Series

Broad City was the single funniest thing on TV this year. I keep grouping it together with sketch shows in my head, because it's rare that a sitcom not only has such a strong voice, but for that voice to be that of the performers. I mean, Community, Taxi, Arrested Development, those shows have strong voices, but they belong to Harmon, Brooks, and Hurwitz, not anyone on screen. Broad City feels as personal as Key and Peele or Inside Amy Schumer, it just happens to be a sitcom.

Louie is of course the other sitcom for which that's true, though it is even less like a traditional sitcom than Broad City is. This season wasn't as ambitious as last season's multiple multi-episode arcs, but being more low key isn't a bad thing. I really hate the Louie/Pamela relationship, especially at this point in its history, but that doesn't mean it doesn't provide good comedy material.

I might put Transparent here even if all it did was give Judith Light a good role again. But Jill Soloway's show has even more going on than that, and although the transition of Jeffrey Tambor's Maura is the main focus, there's plenty going on in the rest of the family -- all of whom are self-absorbed, obnoxious, and various degrees of broken, which isn't surprising for a show created by a Six Feet Under vet.

The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt seems more like a network show than any other Netflix show does, but only because the work Tina Fey previously did on 30 Rock changed what network sitcoms can feel like. In a world that hadn't already seen 30 Rock, this show might be almost too weird, and maybe that's why NBC passed on it at the last minute. But it's one of the best things to come along in ages -- it's like Fey and her co-creator have realized that what sitcoms like to do is let their performers really ham it up, so they put something together where (just as in 30 Rock) hamming it up somehow works because of who the characters are (a girl recently escaped from a cult, an out of work actor, a wealthy trophy wife) instead of being yet another grating schlub of a husband rolling his eyes at his grating blonde of a momwife.

There are a lot of animated series that deserve at least consideration here. Rick and Morty didn't air last Emmy season, it turns out -- I didn't discover it until late -- but Adventure Time had a very strong season as it delves deeper and deeper into its own mythos and gets weirder and weirder. Bob's Burgers is of course always great. But I think the best thing in this mini-category this year was Netflix's Bojack Horseman, with Will Arnett as the anthropomorphic horse former star of a TGIF-type 90s sitcom. There are so many great things about this darkly funny and sometimes very bleak show, though my favorite is probably Vincent Adultman.


Lead Actress

Although Britta was underused in some of this year's Community episodes, Gillian Jacobs was still the funniest part of more episodes than not. While everyone on the cast has always seemed thoroughly comfortable in their characters, Jacobs really nailed Britta's combination of physical comedy, intellectual pretensions, and lack of self-awareness, bringing one of my all-time favorite TV characters to new heights of greatness. She's a large part of why this was one of the best seasons (despite the missing cast members, only the first two seasons were better).

Both Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson have to be on here for Broad City. And although I'm not going as far as imaginary nominations for guest stars, I'll reiterate that Kelly Ripa was fantastic, and really emblematic of what the guest star Emmy often represents: an actor working outside their usual boundaries and making something excellent happen there.

I'm not sure this was Amy Poehler's funniest season of Parks and Rec, but it was consistently one of the funniest shows on the air and even her weakest season would put her in the top five performances on TV, no question. Besides, there is something so joyful about Leslie Knope that it's always fun to see good things happen for her.

Ellie Kemper anchored The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and made it look easy, though I realize I'm including her at the expense of Julia Louis-Dreyfuss on Veep, Gaby Hoffmann on Transparent, and Constance Wu on Fresh Off the Boat.

Lead Actor

Jeffrey Tambor has had a hell of a career, hasn't he? He's come a long way since The Ropers, but even if Larry Sanders was the thing he was remembered for, that'd be a pretty great career. But then came Arrested Development, and suddenly he was at the center of two all-time great shows. And now a third with Transparent. Somehow you can always find him right there wherever the most innovative and interesting work is happening, and this time, he's anchoring the whole thing.

Louis CK is never not going to be on this list, not as long as he's making his show.

Keegan Michael Key and Jordan Peele are consistently funnier than the vast majority of sitcoms out there, and even their goofiest, most ridiculous stuff -- okay, maybe especially that -- always makes me laugh, from "A. A. ron" to "L'Carpetron Dookmarriott" to, well, this.

Did Review actually come out during the just-ended Emmy season, or was it the one before that? Well whatever, I'm going to say Andy Daly here, the lead of Review, a show that might not sound amazing -- fictional TV show host "reviews" real-life experiences like "stealing," "being a racist," and "eating ten pancakes" -- until you see it.


Drama

Series

Mad Men had a fantastic season, albeit one with a rocky start -- I'm still not sold on the necessity of Diane, even as I recognize how she got us from point A to point B (and maybe that's the problem, since who fondly remembers a character as the route from one place in the story to another?) and am ambivalent about a few other aspects. But I think it's probably a show that should leave you feeling that way.

With Mad Men and Breaking Bad done, the best dramas by far are Rectify and The Leftovers, both of which can be slow and thoughtful in novelistic ways, though I recognize that is frustrating for much of the potential audience. It isn't for me. I'd be on board for a Rectify that was twice as slow. These shows are exactly why TV is great these days, because when else would we have a slow-paced show about a man recently released from prison from death row for a murder he isn't sure if he committed or not, or a bleak portrait of families (and communities) gradually falling apart in the wake of a Rapture-like event?

Better Call Saul is way up there, it's just a little harder to call it a drama at times. But that's not a new problem, right? Ally McBeal was nominated for comedy Emmys but felt like apples and oranges against its sitcom competitors, and before that, St Elsewhere got drama awards but was funny at least as often as BCS.

Took me a minute to think of what the fifth nominee should be. The Good Wife had too uneven a season and the nonsense with Archie Panjabi and Julianna Margulies reached its show-affecting peak. Justified had its strongest season since the Bennetts, but still felt like it was treading water at times. The Americans, on the other hand, dealt with some of its strongest material, though I am still having trouble swallowing some of the plot developments (or the lack of certain plot developments occurring, I suppose) where Clark and Martha are concerned.

Lead Actress

Elisabeth Moss is the best actress on television in the 2010s, period. Okay, Connie Britton could give her a run for her money if Nashville gave her material to work with as strong as Friday Night Lights did, but between Mad Men and Top of the Lake, there is just no one else who has done better than Moss in recent years. The final season of Mad Men includes some of the best Peggy moments, especially the final two episodes. I really hope we don't lose Moss to movies. There is a particular joy in seeing the way an actor develops a character over time, one you can only find in television.

Carrie Coon and Amy Brenneman are the strongest performers on The Leftovers, doing very different work that -- like that of Moss and Christina Hendricks on Mad Men, for instance -- is grounded in their shared world. I knew Brenneman was good, of course, but it's great seeing her have something so meaty to work with, while Coon has been a revelation.

Speaking of revelations, Keri Russell somehow keeps getting better and better. Felicity is a pretty underrated show in the first place -- I think it's too easily summed up by its sort of wincey "girl follows crush to college" premise -- and Mission Impossible aside, she didn't have a lot of high-profile movie work in between series. But holy shit is she good on The Americans. If we weren't in such a golden age of drama, it would be no contest, hers would be the best female performance on TV.

Although Orphan Black hasn't stayed as strong as its first season, that's largely because of the rambling plotting. Tatiana Maslany continues to do heroic work in half a dozen roles -- differentiating them by more than just their hairstyle would be hard enough, but she manages to bring nuance to characters who could easily seem straight out of Central Casting, especially soccer mom Alison.

Lead Actor

Look, lots of guys were great this year, and it's a shame Aden Young hasn't already got an Emmy for Rectify, but he'll have time, as will Bob Odenkirk for Better Call Saul. This year has to be Jon Hamm. There is no close second. It has to be Don Draper. Come on. Teach the world to sing.


Supporting performances

I would nominate everyone on Transparent, Mad Men, and Rectify who doesn't qualify as a lead. Sam Elliott is probably an obvious choice for Justified; same with Michael McKean from Better Call Saul. Speaking of which, I was unfamiliar with Rhea Seehorn before BCS, but she's terrific. The whole Togetherness cast has submitted as supporting actors, and they all deserve nominations. Lorraine Toussaint and Uzo Adaba are the obvious choices from Orange is the New Black. Anybody on The New Girl or Parks is Emmy-worthy -- like a lot of the best sitcoms (Taxi, Mary Tyler Moore, Community, Happy Endings), the strength of those shows is their combinations of characters, much more than any one central performance. Zach Woods and T.J. Miller deserve nods for Silicon Valley, too, as does Kether Dononue for You're the Worst.

what I'm watching

I have a very long Mad Men post and a shorter post about Galavant and Bunheads, but neither is ready to fire, so I thought I'd make a general catch-up post since there have been a lot of post-worthy events lately.

The Last Man on Earth

Boy did this go from intriguing to total shit in about forty minutes. The first half of the premiere made a fairly compelling case for "how exactly would you make a sitcom about the last person on Earth," only to introduce the last woman on Earth (and in subsequent episodes, yet more survivors). The longer this series goes on, the more it resembles some extreme form of the According to Jim/King of Queens model of Doofus Husband, Nagging Wife, a sitcom genre we should be streets ahead of by now. Phil is just fucking awful. Carol is only slightly better, and in large part because I feel bad for how terribly the show treats her. Both are one-note characters, and it's an old, tired note. Together they're a sad trombone, is what I'm saying.

Even when a second man turns up -- played by the terrific Mel Rodriguez, veteran of lamented one-and-dones Enlisted and Running Wilde -- Phil's only reaction is how this affects his sex life as the heretofore last Y-chromosome on Earth. He can't even bothered to muster up any equally shallow responses, like hey, here's someone else who can do some of the manual labor I'm shirking, or hey, here's a guy who might actually be my friend so I don't have to talk to basketballs.

What a huge disappointment. I'm sticking with it in the hopes that another twist puts us back on course, as I know a lot of people are, but I expected better from the creative team and from Will Forte.

The Americans and Justified

How fucking good is Keri Russell on The Americans? There aren't many shows I was more looking forward to than this, and it has not disappointed. K-Russ is aces, and this may be her strongest season. I'd be ready to assume hers will be the best performance of the year in the Actress - Drama category, if I weren't expecting great things for Elisabeth Moss in Mad Men's final round.

Another Emmy contender is Joelle Carter on Justified. The series has struggled since the end of the second season -- the Bennett family's season -- to come up with an antagonist as compelling as Mags, which has made a lot of subsequent seasons uneven, but knowing this is the last season freed them up to focus on the show's backbone: the relationships among Raylan, Boyd, and Ava. Sure, everything and everybody else serves only as a distraction from that backbone, but because it's the final season and we're expecting it to all come to a head instead of Raylan and Boyd continuing to postpone their last draw, distraction isn't a bad thing.

This is the part of the season where I start worrying for the cast. Will Joelle Carter wind up the wife on some southern-fried variant of the Doofus Husband, Nagging Wife sitcom? Will she be some Disney kid's mom on some ABC Family show? Please somebody give this woman another cable drama role.

Jere Burns has a role in Steve and Nancy Carrell's Angie Tribeca, starring Rashida Jones, which sounds good - I don't know how big a role, of course. I've been a JB fan since Max Headroom and especially Dear John (and subsequently in Something So Right, Good Morning Miami, etc etc).

The Flash

Things are shaping up, but I hate the idea of Golden Glider's power being a gun that turns people into gold. Stay home, turn golf balls into gold, and sell them and buy better powers.

Community

Something has seemed a little tonally off - I don't know how much of the writing staff made the leap to Yahoo, but it could easily just be the lack of Troy and Shirley - but every second of Gillian Jacobs this season has been amazing. Britta seems a little weirder now.

Broad City

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I hope Kelly Ripa is nominated for an Emmy. Broad City was one of the best shows so far this year, and Ripa's episode is one of those absolutely perfect episodes that immediately goes to the TV Hall of Fame.

iZombie

Off to a pretty swell start. Right from the first few minutes it's more engaging than the superhero shows, and that Rob Thomas sense of fun is there front and center. Couldn't be more pleased with this.