Every Episode of Community, Ranked From Worst to Best (Part 2)

From streets behind to streets ahead: Today, we finish our ranked countdown of every episode of Community. While there were a few "opposite of Batman" installments in the first half of the list, the rest are all redheads who drink scotch and love Die Hard. We suggest you get their number, starting with 50.

50. "Biology 101" (Season 3, Episode 1)

Table-setting with a wink, like most Community premieres. But it's also blisteringly sarcastic, opening with a big musical fantasy number about how everyone is going to be more "calm and normal" and appeal to a bigger audience in year three. Later, after the show has instead indulged in some Kubrickian weirdness for weirdness' sake, the dean enters to promise that things won't be much different after all, they’ll just have less money. No wonder NBC fired Harmon shortly thereafter: He kicked off a new season of his ratings-challenged show with what looks an awful lot like a middle finger to the very idea of chasing better ratings.

49. "Contemporary American Poultry” (Season 1, Episode 21)

Community's first episode-length dabble in parody (or homage, as Abed once corrected) is a pitch-perfect Goodfellas spoof in which the group takes over the cafeteria kitchen. More than just the specificity of the Scorsese tribute (they actually shelled out for "Layla"), "Contemporary American Poultry" establishes the show's gift for using the Young Frankenstein school of comedy to better explore character dynamics — in this case, the power struggle between Jeff and Abed, the former threatened by his loss of influence, the latter seduced by the ability to reshape the social economy around a currency he can actually understand.

48. "Applied Anthropology and Culinary Arts" (Season 2, Episode 22)

Shirley gives birth during class in what TV critics (and Abed) would call another classic bottle episode. It's a really good one, too, bringing the pregnancy storyline to term in a highly satisfying way, paying off a running background sight gag from 19 episodes prior, and handing everyone (even Star-Burns!) a big laugh. Put this cast in a room and something funny will happen.

47. "Communications Studies" (Season 1, Episode 16)

Before going on to pen quips for Spider-Man, Chris McKenna wrote some of Community's finest half hours. His first is a grounded gem, following Jeff's attempts to restore the balance in his friendship with Britta after she leaves him an embarrassing drunk-dial voicemail — a sitcom scheme that leads to some Breakfast Club dancing and the spectacle of a hungover Abed deprived of his pop-culture knowhow. If people got truly involved in the will-they/won't-they the show would move beyond after Season 1, episodes like this are the reason why.

46. "Aerodynamics of Gender" (Season 2, Episode 7)

You knew Community was, ahem, bouncing into a new stratosphere of giddy weirdness when it cast future Veep lackey Matt Walsh as the caretaker of a trampoline bathed in beatific Secret Garden light. The rest of the fun here is more verbal than visual, hinging on the ladies reprogramming Abed into an insult-dishing Robocop able to mechanically pinpoint (and mock) everyone's physical flaws. His self-owning restoration of the mean-girl status quo is quietly affecting.

45. "Queer Studies and Advanced Waxing" (Season 6, Episode 4)

Jim Rash's most substantial A plot is a sharp jab at institutional representation politics, as the school board pressures the dean to identify as only gay, stuffing all the other aspects of his complicated sexuality into the closet. (He even gets an incredible theme song set to the tune of "Jolene.") If that weren’t enough, "Queer Studies and Advanced Waxing" also boasts what might be the best Chang subplot ever: his acting debut in a stage version of The Karate Kid, with a gut-busting Jason Mantzoukas as the theater director verbally abusing him to greatness.

44. "Foosball and Nocturnal Vigilantism" (Season 3, Episode 9)

The simpatico, underutilized odd-couple pairing of Jeff and Shirley got its most dramatic showcase at the foosball table, where the two discover how their paths crossed as kids and revive the origin-story rivalry that shaped them both. Come for the stylish anime interlude, stay for the denouement of inner-child reconciliation, featuring one of the most poignant uses of Ludwig Göransson’s cooing, breathtakingly lovely soundtrack cue “Greendale Is Where I Belong.” Plus: the winningly goofy B plot, a classic lie-that-gets-out-of-hand farce in cape and cowl.

43.-42. "A Fistful Of Paintballs" (Season 2, Episode 23) and

"For a Few Paintballs More" (Season 2, Episode 24)

If #AndAMovie never really, actually happens, we'll still have this sweepingly cinematic two-part finale, upping the ante on Season 1's wildly popular paintball episode with a spaghetti Western that morphs into an epic nod to Star Wars, all while serving as a suitably character-driven climax to Pierce's season-long villain arc. Seeing what he pulled off here on a network sitcom budget, is it any great surprise that director Joe Russo (along with brother Anthony) graduated to Marvel duty shortly thereafter?

41. "The Art Of Discourse" (Season 1, Episode 22)

No one acts their age in this glorious parade of immaturity — not Pierce, who risks getting booted from the group after pantsing Shirley; and certainly not Jeff and Britta, who sink to the almost literally sophomoric level of the high-schoolers tormenting them. Lest one think it's all juvenile pratfalls, "The Art of Discourse" has one brainy subversion up its sleeve: Abed running down an actual checklist of stereotypical college experiences, and hence allowing the show to do Animal House without actually doing Animal House. John Belushi bless whoever made the exquisitely stupid song that plays over the obligatory food fight.

40. "Basic Rocket Science" (Season 2, Episode 4)

Galvanized by the popularity of "Modern Warfare," Harmon and his showrunners doubled down on the genre pastiche. The first of Season 2's affectionate sprints through movie history reenacts Apollo 13 inside a Winnebago space-shuttle simulator sponsored by KFC. The geeky precision of the references (including an opening lifted from The Right Stuff) never distracts from the show's winning strategy of letting these frazzled friends work out their interpersonal issues in close quarters.

39. "Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps" (Season 3, Episode 5)

Halloween provokes a hysterical campfire anthology, the characters regaling each other with scary stories filtered through their individual biases and hangups. The vignettes alone make this a Treehouse of Horror worth climbing, but it's the framing device — Britta trying to flush out the supposed psychopath among them — that takes it over the top. Incredible final beat, providing an answer the group prefers not to know.

38. "Social Psychology" (Season 1, Episode 4)

Though Abed likens his relationship with Annie to Phoebe and Chandler ("They never really had stories together"), Community arguably and quickly surpassed Friends in its capacity to fruitfully pair pretty much all of its main characters. That includes Jeff and Shirley, unexpectedly bonding over their shared love of gossip and "ripping on" their classmates. (Their main target, Eric Christian Olsen's hippy himbo Vaughn, was a great recurring foil in Season 1.) This is what a show hitting its stride and locking into its ensemble magic very early looks like.

37. "Celebrity Pharmacology" (Season 2, Episode 13)

Harmon's antagonistic relationship with Chevy Chase gradually crept into the show, art imitating life as Pierce became a bona fide bad guy over the course of Season 2. He's delightfully hateable in this uproarious episode, egotistically hijacking Annie's drug awareness play for middle-schoolers and threatening to transform the show into pro-narcotics propaganda. It's Chang, another character the show would later tilt from friend to enemy (and then back again), who rushes to the rescue; his flamboyant third-act performance as the nightmarishly hostile "Drugs" might be the comic highpoint of Ken Jeong's tenure on the show.

36. "G.I. Jeff" (Season 5, Episode 11)

In which a sitcom with an increasingly animated sensibility goes literally animated, inserting the cast into a highly specific satire of the '80s Saturday morning cartoon show G.I. Joe. Look past the fast-flying jokes aimed at Hasbro heads, and the real target of this mid-life crisis coma dream is anyone wistful for the simple comforts of a lousy childhood staple. "G.I. Jeff" itself would become a relic soon after, making fans nostalgic for the days when Community still had the budget to do anything like it.

35. "Introduction to Finality" (Season 3, Episode 22)

The first season finale of the show clearly designed to function, if necessary, as a series finale. Per the title, a real sense of premature valediction settles over the busy proceedings, which involve such climactic events as Jeff returning to a courtroom, Troy fulfilling his repairman-messiah destiny (the zaniest running narrative of a zany year at Greendale), and Abed briefly becoming his own "darkest timeline" evil doppelganger. If the closing monologue is not one of the Wingman's most convincing or satisfying, the extended version of The 88's opening theme provides the necessary sense of open-ended transition for a show that would proceed on borrowed time going forward.

34. "Herstory of Dance" (Season 4, Episode 8)

Reportedly the least-watched episode of the whole series, at least by Nielsen's estimation... which is a shame, because it's a fizzy delight, giving Community's maligned fourth season a good name. Britta cornering herself into a "Sophie B. Hawkins dance" just to avoid copping to a mistake is at once a vintage misadventure for the stubborn character and, in unlikely resolution, an auto-critique of how the show often made her the butt of the joke. And Abed's screwball multiple-dates storyline winks at romantic comedy tropes while charmingly fulfilling others, thanks in part to a charming guest spot by future superstar Brie Larson.

33. "VCR Maintenance and Educational Publishing" (Season 5, Episode 9)

In fact, Larson made such an adorkably perfect match for Abed in "Herstory of Dance" that Harmon brought her back when he took over the show again in Season 5. She's just one commendable element of an episode that cuts between a tense, high-stakes game night and a stolen-textbook caper that brings out Shirley's cold-blooded side. The dialogue by Donald Diego, making his writing debut on the series, sometimes approaches the hard-boiled flavor of Breaking Bad — maybe not a coincidence, given that Vince Gilligan plays the host of the bewilderingly complicated VHS game Abed and Annie try.

32. "Digital Estate Planning" (Season 3, Episode 20)

Exhibit A in the case for Community as one of TV's most formally adventurous comedies: an entire episode made to resemble an 8-bit video game, with primitive digital avatars of the characters navigating a Zelda-like kingdom created by Pierce's dead dad. Even in two dimensions, our heroes remain multi-dimensional; that everyone's personalities shine through the Atari makeover is a testament to the voice acting, the surprisingly expressive animation (graphics?), or likely both.

31. "Romantic Expressionism" (Season 1, Episode 15)

When Annie starts dating Vaughn, Jeff and Britta conspire to break them up. Halfway through its first season, Community was comfortable acknowledging how potentially incestuous and f*cked up its group dynamic was, summed up neatly by a line of Winger commentary: "Unlike a real family, there’s nothing to stop any one of us from looking at any one of the others as a sexual prospect." That tension and more — including the show's divided impulses towards warming hearts and smashing conventions — gives "Romantic Expressionism" its welcome charge. Also, the amateur, dorm-room MST3K subplot is Pierce at his most mortifying. Which is to say, his funniest.

30. "Introduction to Teaching" (Season 5, Episode 2)

Much more so than "Repilot," this is where Harmon makes the case for a postgraduate Community. Moving Jeff from the student directory to the teachers' lounge gave the show a shot of new life. And so did Jonathan Banks, whose salty, no-nonsense shop teacher Buzz Hickey grounded the show a little in its penultimate year. But not too much: Abed losing himself in the conundrum that is Nicolas Cage is wacky in the best way, building to a comic setpiece that should have won Danny Pudi an Emmy, or at least landed him a hosting gig on Saturday Night Live.

29. "Debate 109" (Season 1, Episode 9)

For six whole seasons, Community tortured shippers and age-gap scolds alike by keeping Jeff and Annie on the perpetual edge of something more; theirs was the one romance the show seemed to really believe in, even as it never quite made it happen. All of that begins with "Debate 109," which expertly weaves their blossoming sexual chemistry into a rousing debate-club showdown built around one of the central moral questions of the series. Man may be evil, but this episode is very, very good.

28. "Introduction to Film" (Season 1, Episode 3)

A Dead Poets Society riff was probably inevitable, but Community got to it early and cleverly by paradoxically making the "inspirational" teacher (a perfectly cast John Michael Higgins) a hardass who sees right through Jeff's insincere imitation of carpe diem spontaneity. There's also Britta's misguided attempt to fund Abed's moviemaking dreams, which culminates in a short film as moving as it is realistically amateurish — and proof from nearly the start that the show wouldn't just play Abed's neurodivergence for laughs, that it would take his inner life and his family's response to it seriously. Throw in the terrific physical comedy of Chase demonstrating a range of "manly" sneezes and you have the first true knockout episode of the series.

27. "App Development and Condiments" (Season 5, Episode 8)

The introduction of an addictive new social-media app reshapes Greendale around a futuristic caste system that's really just a digital popularity contest. The show's usual ability to do elaborate world-building in roughly 22 minutes (often in the context of a paintball game) is part of the joke here, with the school adapting so fast to its Brave New World that Jeff can do a whole observational stand-up comedy routine about it. Add in the non-sequitur involvement of a previously unmentioned middle-aged party animal played by the creator of Arrested Development and we have no choice but to rate the episode a perfect five on the MeowMeowBeanz scale.

26. "Football, Feminism and You" (Season 1, Episode 6)

It took Donald Glover a few episodes to figure out Troy — to find the adolescent excitability and space-cadet obtusity behind his varsity swagger. But he was funny from the start. Look no further than this Season 1 triumph, one of those no-frills, no-fuss Community episodes that runs solely on sharp writing and chemistry. Shirley schooling Britta on proper bathroom validation and Pierce and the dean cooking up the racially featureless nightmare mascot The Human Being are first-rate stories. But it's Glover who takes it over the goal line — trading fast banter with McHale on the field, doing a "politically conservative high school shamefully outdated fight rap" in the cafeteria.

25. "Pillows and Blankets" (Season 3, Episode 14)

Before we had Documentary Now, we had Community's ultra-exact forays into nonfiction parody, including a truly unlikely primetime play on the archival history lessons of Ken Burns. The talking heads, the sepia-toned still photography, the somber recitation of documents (here text messages and emails): It's such an accurate replication of the language of The Civil War that the actual jokes almost feel like a bonus. That "Pillows and Blankets" also doubles as a great Troy and Abed story, threatening and then reaffirming their bond, demonstrates what a tightrope this show walked between elaborate conceptual humor and investment in characters we cared about.

24. "Documentary Filmmaking: Redux" (Season 3, Episode 8)

Even better (and more niche) is the show's Hearts of Darkness episode, with the dean slipping into his most elaborate costume yet: the profile of a megalomaniacal Francis Ford Coppola, losing his mind directing a 60-second commercial. The episode, a rare showcase for Rash's comic range, happened to air the week NBC put the series on hiatus and under threat of cancellation, prompting a tweet-quip from Harmon: "AND, tonight, celebrate Community's unschedualization with the least accessible, least marketable episode in its alienating history!"

23. "Beginner Pottery" (Season 1, Episode 19)

The faculty manifest of Greendale was stocked with ringers, the stand-up and network-TV veterans who dropped by like kooky substitutes each week. That's how we got Buster Bluth as a pottery instructor with a zero tolerance policy on Ghost jokes, and The Six Million Dollar Man at the helm of a parking-lot sailing class. Beyond those superb guest spots, "Beginner Pottery" best demonstrates what former E! host McHale brought to the table: a leading-man swagger, charisma incarnate, that he’d enjoyably destabilize with cracks of insecurity — this time via his one-sided rivalry with the saintly Dr. Rich, a paranoid competitiveness that leads, blessedly, to "Goldbluming."

22. "Curriculum Unavailable" (Season 3, Episode 19)

Essentially a retread of the previous season's "Paradigms of Human Memory." But hey, the fake-clip-show format still works like gangbusters, even (or perhaps especially) with John Hodgman as a therapist cuing each cutaway. The big Shutter Island twist is flawlessly executed: It's easy to get suckered right along with the characters, then laugh at your own susceptibility.

21. "Virtual Systems Analysis" (Season 3, Episode 16)

For all the show celebrated Abed's wild, movie-inflected imagination, it also wasn't afraid to explore how that sometimes limited his empathy and alienated him. "Virtual Systems Analysis" might be the most insightful glimpse into his psychology, opened up via an urgent session in his sanctuary of make believe, the Dreamatorium. All the sci-fi simulation stuff supports a touching therapeutic odyssey with Annie, and a good reminder that their relationship was among the show's richest.

20. "Emotional Consequences of Broadcast Television" (Season 6, Episode 13)

How else could Community end but with one big meta conversation about its own uncertain future? Running through hypothetical Season 7s might feel like an overly gimmicky conclusion if these "pitches" didn’t generously showcase the remaining characters, and if they weren’t threaded so plainly through Jeff's — and, by extension, Harmon's and probably the audience's — complicated feelings about moving on. If the final scenes don’t put a lump in your throat, you're either allergic to Lord Huron or the head of programming at NBC.

19. "Basic Human Anatomy" (Season 4, Episode 11)

The one true all-timer of the gas-leak year engineers a Freaky Friday body swap for Troy and Abed, allowing Glover and Pudi to do uncanny impressions of each other. (Rash, who wrote the great script, also does a pretty mean McHale.) The real power of the episode is how it uses this Hollywood high concept to bring the Troy and Britta love story to a close, breaking them up in a way — at once screwball and sensitive — that felt true to the characters. Fans may hate Season 4, but at least once, it delivered.

18. "Critical Film Studies" (Season 2, Episode 19)

The advertisements played up the Pulp Fiction cosplay of the B plot, but this aptly titled valentine to cinematic gabfests owes even more to its other point of reference: Louis Malle's iconically verbose art-house classic My Dinner With Andre. That’s a pretty highbrow inspiration for a sitcom, and director Richard Ayoade — star of the similarly nerdy IT Crowd — leans into the urbane details as much as Abed does. But you don’t need a Criterion Channel subscription to appreciate the comic layers of the episode’s tête-à-tête, a fake conversation that becomes a real one about what it means to have a real conversation.

17. "Epidemiology" (Season 2, Episode 6)

Even when Community reached for a less heady homage, it complicated the equation. Take, for example, this endlessly rewatchable Halloween episode, which rolls a familiar Dawn of the Dead nod into a miniature Mamma Mia!, using ABBA's greatest hits as an impish counterpoint to the mayhem. It took real moxie to make zombies fun again during a decade so lousy with them, though "Epidemiology" benefitted from arriving before the market became truly oversaturated; three days after it premiered, The Walking Dead shambled onto TV.

16. "Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality" (Season 5, Episode 7)

While the Russos may be the most successful directors of Community's graduating class — if one defines success as making huge blockbusters for boatloads of money — it's Tristram Shapeero who probably most elevated the look and feel of this vibrant small-screen comedy. The second to last of his whopping 24 episodes is a typically elegant juggling act, gracefully toggling between three top-tier storylines (including a rare A-plot dilemma for John Oliver's skeezy Professor Duncan). The big standout, though, is Abed's clash with Hickey — a fantastic buddy-comedy collision of stubborn personalities that really makes you wish both Banks and Shapeero stuck around for Season 6.

15. "Conspiracy Theories and Interior Design" (Season 2, Episode 9)

Harmon's clear love-hate relationship with overly complicated mindf*cks (see: the multiple Inception references across his body of work) gets its most entertaining workout, as Jeff's scheme to invent a blow-off class leads him and Annie down a conspiracy-thriller rabbit hole. The third act, which was supposedly written at the last minute, reaches a true fever pitch of twist-ending absurdity, buoyed by Rash's mounting hysteria and Kevin Corrigan's theatrical performance as the improbably named, dubiously real Professor Professorson. On our end, it's all love, no hate for this kind of ridiculous rug-pulling.

14. "Paradigms of Human Memory" (Season 2, Episode 21)

Clip shows that pull from nonexistent episodes are another Harmon speciality. The conceit pays huge comic dividends in "Paradigms of Human Memory," which briefly reinvented Community into a rapid-fire reel of proto-TikTok cutaway sketches. More than that, it allowed the show to poke fun at its own conventions (like the standard Winger wrap-up speech), lampoon fan supercuts that assemble microscopic "proof" of the romantic spark between characters, and reveal the hookups happening between the scenes of earlier scenes. Naturally, Harmon would find further use for this puckish twist on an old TV cost-saving measure, here and on Rick and Morty.

13. "Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking" (Season 2, Episode 16)

"It’s easy to tell a complex story when you can just cut to characters explaining things to the camera," says budding filmmaker Abed of his decision to dabble in the trendy mockumentary format of his show's Must See TV neighbors. In this case, said story — Pierce fakes a terminal illness to enact cruelly psychological revenge on the rest of the study group — is so strong that it could be told in almost any style. But the episode commits very well to its adopted approach, exploiting the conventions of the Parks and Recreation and Office way even as it performs some very lightly competitive TV criticism. As Abed concludes during the voice-over finale, it works.

12. "Regional Holiday Music" (Season 3, Episode 10)

Less affectionately did Community skewer its original timezone rival, Glee, to which it subjected offhand cracks over the years… until finally just going ahead and doing a full-episode takedown of TV's most popular jukebox musical. Thing is, "Regional Holiday Music" works splendidly as a musical, tossing off funny earworms — a Childish Gambino rap, a sharp jab at the cooing "sexiness" of "Santa Baby" — no less irresistible for how witheringly they target another show's supposedly pandering tactics. It's the Christmas episode as infectious diss track, and a holiday hate-a-thon that has its yule log cake and joyfully devours it, too.

11. "Basic Lupine Urology" (Season 3, Episode 17)

With no guarantee of a renewal, Harmon and co. took a nothing-left-to-lose tact in the second half of Season 3, boldly experimenting with the sitcom form. From this hot streak of creativity came the most spot-on parody in a series that excelled at them: an almost forensic replication of the look, sound, cadence, and structure of a Law & Order episode. Seriously, you could slot this thing into a SVU marathon and barely notice the difference — except, of course, when the late Michael K. Williams is on screen as Professor Kane, bringing a little Wire gravity to the show's note-perfect imitation of a Dick Wolf procedural.

10. "Physical Education" (Season 1, Episode 17)

Entertainment Weekly critic John Young cited it as the episode he'd use to introduce the uninitiated to the show, and we couldn't agree more. "Physical Education" has no big gimmick, just a breathless volley of snappy one-liners and two equally rock-solid storylines: Jeff vainly locking horns with the billiards instructor (Boy Meets World's Blake Clark) who insists he wear gym shorts in class; and the group playing collective matchmaker for Abed when they discover he has a secret admirer. Of course, there's still room for a little parody: A Color of Money montage demonstrated that even when the show wasn't going full Mel Brooks, a love for pop culture ran deeply through its veins.

9. "Competitive Ecology" (Season 3, Episode 3)

Most of the time, Community concluded that its characters made each other better people — that they were stronger (and more virtuous) together than apart. The sour, scathing counterpoint was "Competitive Ecology," which split the study group into lab-partner pairings to bring out the petty resentments and codependency bubbling beneath the surface of their usual kumbaya. The harshest tweak to the formula is the introduction of a scapegoat outsider, Todd (David Neher), who politely endures their abuse, before finally dropping a Frank Grimes-worthy truth bomb: "Your love is weird and toxic!" Even the usual climactic reconciliation drips with venom. It's the most caustically funny episode of the series — and that's without even getting into the deranged subplot, an absurdist noir inside Chang's head.

8. "Messianic Myths and Ancient Peoples" (Season 2, Episode 5)

Pressed by Shirley into making a movie about Jesus, Abed turns the whole project into a Charlie Kaufman-esque ouroboros, becoming a false idol of New Age narcissism in the process. While the writers had long positioned Abed as a one-man Greek chorus, commenting upon the story from within, here he becomes a vessel for self-critique — a way for Community to rib its most self-indulgent tendencies. But "Messianic Myths and Ancient Peoples" also exemplifies the show's ability to ground even the most meta of material in relatable human drama, in this case by building to a moving act of sacrifice on Shirley's part. Factor in Pierce falling in with the wrong crowd (a teenage rebellion minus the teenagers) and you have one divine half hour of comedy.

7. "Investigative Journalism" (Season 1, Episode 13)

Community's sprint towards aggressive self-referentiality didn’t begin in earnest until about halfway through Season 1. Or more specifically, until the show returned from holiday hiatus with what might be its most brilliant inside joke: the introduction of Jack Black as an obnoxiously physical, broadly "appealing" new character awkwardly shoehorned into the study group. Black's screamingly funny performance (probably the best guest spot on a show with a lot of contenders for that title) can't help but look like a sly burn on the suits who probably proposed adding someone like him to goose viewership. But then, no such speculation is necessary to appreciate the barrage of formally playful gags, like Black being cut off mid-sentence by the opening credits or inserted into the background of previous episodes. For that and more, this one earns our heartiest "You go girl!"

6. "Cooperative Calligraphy" (Season 2, Episode 8)

Who needs multiple locations when you have a cast and creative team this talented? "Cooperative Calligraphy" pared the show down to its bare essentials (literally at one point) with what plays like a social experiment: the psychological tug of war over the seemingly inconsequential matter of a missing pen. In the process, it demonstrated that these were characters (and actors) so likable that we'd gladly spend a half hour watching them snipe at each other behind four walls. For all its cinematic aspirations, Community recognized the theatrical simplicity inherent to the best sitcoms, the Neil Simon magic that can happen on a small stage — or around a long table, as it were.

5. "Remedial Chaos Theory" (Season 3, Episode 4)

On the other end of the spectrum, a radically imaginative storytelling exercise — albeit one that unfolds in a single location, too. The tossing of a six-sided die creates multiple speculative versions of a party, envisioning how the same few minutes of time might play out with one particular member of the study group absent. This butterfly-effect device allowed the show to meditate on the precarious balance of personalities that made up its principal cast of characters. Earning the series its only Emmy nomination for writing, “Remedial Chaos Theory” would send shockwaves through the episodes that followed, inspiring talk of multiple (and darkest) timelines that would slowly wear thin. But on its own terms, it's an ingenious outlier, not least for daring to wonder aloud about how much good versus harm Jeff Winger was really doing in the lives of his study buddies.

4. "Modern Warfare" (Season 1, Episode 23)

The paintball game that launched a thousand movie parodies and several lesser sequels, while establishing the show's ambition to act as a sandbox for genre pastiche. Directed by Justin Lin, bringing the virtuosity of his Fast & Furious entries to the small screen, "Modern Warfare" is a marvel of economy and resourcefulness, delivering a highly satisfying fallen-world action movie across just a few minutes, all while finally pushing the testy rapport between Jeff and Britta to a crescendo. Rapturous reviews cataloged the visual nods to a whole video-store aisle of pulp fiction, but it's the actors who sell the Tarantino-lite joy of the endeavor: the way Troy warmly greets Jeff like a comrade he hasn't seen in years, or the little "ta da" Chang lets loose when revealing the bomb under his jacket, Predator-style.

3. "Comparative Religion" (Season 1, Episode 12)

While later seasons would reach delirious new heights of conceptual audacity, there’s a case to be made that the show was never more endearing than when simply functioning as… a sitcom about students at a community college. Its inaugural Christmas episode is the platonic ideal of a “standard” Community installment: A great premise — Jeff is cornered into fighting a school bully (Anthony Michael Hall), much to the Christian chagrin of Shirley — facilitates an almost musical crossfire of badinage, giving every member of the study group a stockpile of comic ammunition. "Comparative Religion" isn't as universally beloved as some of the show's bigger swings, but it's effortlessly hilarious from start to finish — and in the bruised smiles of its ending, a fine illustration of how Community pulled cheer, seasonal or otherwise, from the jaws of conflict.

2. "Cooperative Polygraphy" (Season 5, Episode 4)

What better way to send off Chase's dearly departed Pierce Hawthorne than with one last fight in the study room? His Machiavellian spirit hangs over this masterpiece of verbal warfare, orchestrated via a lie-detector test that forces everyone to confront each other's dirtiest secrets. The dialogue is a rat-a-tat symphony of evasions and recriminations, punctuated by the farcical intrusion of an operator calling out each fib. And even more so than its spiritual predecessor, "Cooperative Calligraphy," the episode feels like the ultimate platform for this cast's collaborative mojo, an antagonistic surrogate-family repartee as fast and witty as a Preston Sturges movie. Any other pick for the runner-up spot would deserve a sharp, loud "Lie!"

1. "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" (Season 2, Episode 14)

At its beating heart, Community was a comedy about imperfect people inching slowly towards self-improvement. Week in and week out, what the characters learned at Greendale was how to care about others as much as they cared about themselves. Never did that crash course in empathy take on bigger stakes than in the show's crowning achievement, in which the group comes together for a role-playing game designed to lift the spirits — and hence save the life — of a classmate (Charley Koontz) experiencing suicidal thoughts. Far from anything like a Very Special Episode, "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" instead found the show firing on all comic cylinders by folding a typically nerdy play on genre into its strongest dialogue-driven vehicle for the whole cast. Harmon himself once wondered if the show was ever better. It wasn't.

Of course, the elephant in the study room is that Community's greatest episode is the one you can't stream anymore; it was pulled from Netflix and Hulu a few years ago thanks to a misjudged gag involving makeup that resembles blackface. Setting aside larger debates about jokes made in poor taste or the value of years-later censorship, is there a more ironic fate for a story about Jeff trying to atone for his insensitivity, the cruel nickname he secretly coined? Maybe it's just the ultimate meta development for a series that survived multiple cancellation scares, only to see its creative pinnacle retroactively, well, canceled.

But speaking of meta: For all Community winked at its behind-the-scenes troubles, this was where it most productively mirrored them, funneling Chase's notoriously contentious relationship with the cast and crew into a magnificent performance of mustache-twirling villainy. Here, too, the writers found the ideal balance between the show's maximalist and minimalist impulses: All the Lord of the Rings grandiosity is conveyed through audio alone, putting an accent on a story that unfolds entirely — as so many of the show's best did — around a single table. In the end, Community was a show by imperfect people, prone to making their own mistakes, artistic and otherwise. With "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons," they converted that imperfection into nearly perfect TV. Excelsior!

You can keep talking about Community with the Primetimer community. 

A.A. Dowd is a writer and editor who lives in Chicago.