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Community (2009)
8.5/10on IMDb
First aired
"Pilot," Season 1, Episode 1 (2009)
Start at the start. Jeff Winger, a fast-talking lawyer whose degree has been revoked, lands at Greendale Community College and ends up leading a study group of misfits: an older man sure of his own wisdom, a 28-year-old dropout with something to prove, a divorced mom, a former high school football star, a high-strung perfectionist and Abed, a pop-culture junkie. It is more conventional than what follows, and that is the point for a newcomer: you meet everyone and learn their rhythms before the show starts bending its own format. Half the later concept episodes only work because you know these seven this well.
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Community (2009)
8.5/10on IMDb
First aired
"Introduction to Statistics," Season 1, Episode 7 (2009)
The first Halloween episode is low on gimmicks and high on character, which makes it a good test of whether the ensemble works for you. Jeff tries to slip away from Annie's Day of the Dead party for a date with his statistics professor, while Pierce has a very public crisis about getting old. Watch for Abed's Batman costume: a small, deadpan running gag that shows how the show plants jokes in the background rather than announcing them.
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Community (2009)
8.5/10on IMDb
First aired
"Contemporary American Poultry," Season 1, Episode 21 (2010)
This is the episode where you find out whether the parody side of Community is for you. A scheme to get the study group better access to the cafeteria's chicken fingers turns into a full Goodfellas homage, voiceover and all, with Abed running the operation. The joke is not just the borrowed style: it is that the mob-movie rise and fall fits the group's petty power struggles almost perfectly. If you laugh here, the bigger genre swings later in the list will land.
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Community (2009)
8.5/10on IMDb
First aired
"Modern Warfare," Season 1, Episode 23 (2010)
The episode that turned Community from a promising sitcom into a cult object. A campus paintball game with early class registration as the prize escalates into a full action movie, and Greendale becomes an all-out war zone. Fast and Furious director Justin Lin shot it like the real thing, which is why it still looks bigger than a sitcom budget should allow. It also sets up two traditions: the paintball episodes that follow, and a habit of hiding a relationship turn inside a genre spectacle.
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Community (2009)
8.5/10on IMDb
First aired
"Epidemiology," Season 2, Episode 6 (2010)
A school Halloween party, a biohazard that gets eaten by mistake and a dean who locks everyone inside add up to a zombie outbreak, and the episode commits to it with horror-movie homages from start to finish. It works as an entry point because the premise needs no backstory: anyone who has seen a zombie movie knows the rules, so the jokes come from watching each character fail at survival in their own particular way. A strong pick for an October watch.
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Community (2009)
8.5/10on IMDb
First aired
"Cooperative Calligraphy," Season 2, Episode 8 (2010)
Annie's pen goes missing, she is sure someone in the study group took it, and the group locks itself in the study room until it turns up. That is the whole setup: a bottle episode, the cheap one-set format most shows try to hide, which Community makes the main event as the searches escalate and the accusations get personal. It is the clearest proof that the show does not need parody to be funny. The concept is just seven people who know each other too well, stuck in one room while Troy and Abed ache to get out to a puppy parade.
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Community (2009)
8.5/10on IMDb
First aired
"Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas," Season 2, Episode 11 (2010)
Abed wakes up convinced the world has turned into stop-motion animation, and the whole episode is animated that way, in the style of the old Rankin/Bass holiday specials. It looks like a novelty, but underneath it is one of the show's most affecting stories about Abed and why he retreats into television, which is why it sticks with people beyond December. Character animator Drew Hodges won an Emmy for his work on it. Watch it after a few earlier episodes, so you already care about Abed when the twist lands.
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Community (2009)
8.5/10on IMDb
First aired
"Advanced Dungeons & Dragons," Season 2, Episode 14 (2011)
Almost the entire episode is the study group sitting around a table playing Dungeons & Dragons, and it is somehow one of the most exciting half hours of the series. The group sets up a game to cheer up Neil, a lonely fellow student, until Pierce barges in uninvited and takes over. You do not need to know the game: the narrated quest is written so the stakes are the people at the table, not the dice. Fans who rank episodes regularly put it near the top, and it shows how much the show can do with almost nothing.
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Community (2009)
8.5/10on IMDb
First aired
"Critical Film Studies," Season 2, Episode 19 (2011)
The group plans a Pulp Fiction themed birthday surprise for Abed, but he sets up a different dinner with Jeff at another restaurant, and the episode turns into a parody of My Dinner with Andre, a film that is almost nothing but two people talking at a table. You do not need to have seen it. The fun is watching Jeff, who expected a gag, get pulled into a long conversation with the friend who usually speaks in references. It is a quiet, odd episode, and a good sign of how far the show will go to try a new shape.
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Community (2009)
8.5/10on IMDb
First aired
"A Fistful of Paintballs" and "For a Few Paintballs More," Season 2, Episodes 23 and 24 (2011)
The season two finale is a two-part sequel to the first paintball game, and it goes bigger in every direction. Part one plays the campus game as a spaghetti western, right down to titles borrowed from Sergio Leone, then part two switches genres as outsiders crash the game and the group has to unite against them. Watch them back to back. They follow on from Modern Warfare, so see that first, but you need nothing else: the factions, betrayals and cash prize are all explained in the moment.
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Community (2009)
8.5/10on IMDb
First aired
"Remedial Chaos Theory," Season 3, Episode 4 (2011)
If someone shows you only one episode, it is usually this one. At Troy and Abed's housewarming, Jeff rolls a die to decide who goes down for the pizza, and the episode plays out each possible result as its own timeline while Abed warns that they are splitting reality six ways. Each version shifts the group's balance a little, and the worst one gave fans the phrase "the darkest timeline." It rewards a newcomer who has met the group, so watch a few of the earlier entries first, but the structure explains itself as it goes.
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Community (2009)
8.5/10on IMDb
First aired
"Pillows and Blankets," Season 3, Episode 14 (2012)
A falling-out between best friends Troy and Abed over whether a campus-wide fort should be built from pillows or blankets becomes a full war, told as a straight-faced Ken Burns style documentary. Keith David, who has narrated real Burns films, delivers the narration with total gravity, and hearing status updates and text messages read out as solemn wartime testimony is the best joke in it. It picks up from the previous episode's fort rivalry, but the documentary format recaps what you need, so it works on its own.
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Community (2009)
8.5/10on IMDb
First aired
"Basic Lupine Urology," Season 3, Episode 17 (2012)
The study group's biology project, a yam, is found smashed on the lab floor, and the investigation that follows is played as a Law & Order episode, from the cold open through the detective work to the trial. The title is itself a joke on that show's creator, Dick Wolf. It is a parody that works even if you have only half-watched the original in a waiting room, and a good example of the cast playing a format completely straight.
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Community (2009)
8.5/10on IMDb
First aired
"Digital Estate Planning," Season 3, Episode 20 (2012)
Pierce's inheritance depends on the group beating a video game his late father left behind, so most of the episode takes place inside a retro 8-bit game, with the cast as pixel sprites. It is the most purely inventive of the season three experiments, and Giancarlo Esposito turns up as the father's right-hand man. It touches on Pierce's family, but the episode explains all you need, and the game's quest makes sense to anyone who has ever played one.
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Community (2009)
8.5/10on IMDb
First aired
"App Development and Condiments," Season 5, Episode 8 (2014)
The one pick from the later seasons, and an honest one: Community after season three is uneven. This episode still lands because it needs no catching up. Greendale beta tests a social app that lets students rate one another, and a fun ranking game soon turns into an all-out class war run on scores, with Jeff and Shirley fighting for the top while Britta rails against the whole idea. It is a sharp, still-relevant satire, and a good test of whether you want to keep going past the classic run.
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