Community Seasons, Sorted
I can’t count the reasons you’d want to read this piece but I wrote it anyway. The best TV sitcom of the NBC late 2000s golden age (sorry The Office, Parks & Rec, 30 Rock), Community’s out now on Netflix so you’ve got no excuse not to binge.
But which of the #sixseasonsandamovie is best?
Find out.
The Best One:
Season two.
The show’s best episode — Cooperative Calligraphy—is in this season and most of its best weird-and-wonderfuls are here. Shirley pregnant with a maybe-Chang. Drew Carey with a hole in his hand. Betty White.
Paradigms of Human Memory. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Anthropology 101.
The Second Best One:
Season one.
“You just stopped being a study group. I hereby pronounce you a community.”
The study group meets, becomes friends, and sets off crazy, Greendale-enabled adventures. It started strong and stayed that way (every season, except four—which I’ll touch on later—is a strong 8/10 at least).
As a note: Jeff/Britta’s a much healthier relationship than Jeff/Annie, which the show leans a bit too heavily on as it continues.
The Third Best One:
Season six.
Spicy but hear me out. As much as it often devolves into Abed-heavy metahumour, it’s at least aiming at an ending. It also manages the unenviable task of bringing characters Frankie and Elroy into the fold for a final run of 13 episodes and, somehow, making us fall in love with them.
Sure, they’re not Troy or Shirley — or even Pierce — but they fit and they’re funny and they challenge the core study group and that’s all we could ask for.
Chang’s also way funnier here than he’s been since season one.
The Fourth Best One:
Season three.
Good, great, fun, wacky, colourful. Introduces the Dreamtorium which is cool and the Air Conditioning Repair School is a blissful fever dream of believable strange. Unfortunately the Chang taking over the school stuff is just a bit too much for me.
Love the school board guys — who get names later on!
The Movie Will Probably Be About This Good.
Hold me to it.
It’s bound to happen now that the show’s on Netflix, the cast is reuniting, and Joel McHale inexplicably did the last episode of Tiger King. Hopefully, it has everyone — Shirley, Troy, the Dean, Hickey, Frankie, Elroy, and, ideally, even Pierce-as-a-ghost.
(I’ve also just realised typing out the above list how many character names end in ‘ie’ or ‘y.’ Even Jeffrey.)
The Fifth Best One:
Season five, fittingly.
Cooperative Polygraphy is one the show’s overall highlights, and Repilot’s good fun but there’s not a lot else that felt that great. Geothermal Escapism is good and sad in the best way but Hickey didn’t really land and gel like Dart and Patashnik.
The Britta:
Season four. The gas leak year…
No, in the interest of not making cheap jokes about what must have been a a difficult decision (made for easy reasons, let’s be honest) for Sony Pictures to fire Dan Harmon, a really hard job for David Guarascio and Moses Port, and the challenges of writing a good character for Pierce, it would have been impossible to really stick the landing in any meaningful way.
I’ll confess that we skipped most of this season on our rewatch but, unfortunately, it lacks the Community spirit — as you’d expect. It still has its moments and Megan Ganz kept the whole thing ticking along as best she could but, unfortunately, Harmon’s difficult, alcoholic, perfectionist, and almost-abusive voice is what makes the show sing and it was just, through no-one else’s fault, missing.
IMO the blame’s on Harmon for this season and I think he’d say the same thing now.
Should there be a season seven?
No. Give me the movie and let everyone move on.
All the best TV from 2007–2009 just let itself finish. Don’t make Community The-Office-itself.
I’ll leave you with this compilation of seasons 1–3’s stingers, timestamped to the best one.
