Dan Harmon Crowns Season 2 As Community's Best, But Mostly For Its Job Security
What set "Community" apart from nearly every other sitcom was its concept episodes that either parodied, homaged, or commented on the tropes of various popular films and television shows. You have "Contemporary American Poultry," which sees the main study group creating a chicken finger mafia in the style of "Goodfellas." You have "Basic Lupine Urology," which parodies "Law & Order" as the gang investigates a sabotaged science class experiment involving a yam. Then, of course, you have the paintball episodes, which call to mind everything from "28 Days Later" to "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly."
My personal favorite episode of "Community" features none of this. "Mixology Certification" is the tenth episode of the second season, and it's simply about the characters going to a local bar to celebrate Donald Glover's Troy Barnes turning 21 years old. With all the whizz-bang wildness the show can provide, I love that the show finds the time to slow down and deal with the honest emotions of the characters without any layers of irony or self-awareness (while also still being hilarious).
I still love the final two seasons of "Community," but the space for these episodes became relatively rare. Due to the show always being on the brink of cancelation, episode orders started getting cut, and the standard season of a network sitcom of over 20 a season was reduced to 13. Now, for many of you, a 13-episode season isn't anything odd.
Nowadays, it's commonplace to get 10 a season, or even less. But for a show as creative and inventive as "Community" to have its episodes halved, that can cause some storytelling hurdles. "Community" creator Dan Harmon certainly felt that limitation. Plus, that is a lot less steady work for a writer.
'We're like The Office!'
Job security was never something Dan Harmon had much of working on "Community." In fact, he was fired from the show after season 3. Having what was essentially a year-long gig working for the premiere network for sitcoms — while managing to have a ton of creative freedom — is something anyone in the business would cherish. Speaking with That Shelf back in 2014, Harmon explained why he believed season 2 of "Community" was the show's peak, both creatively and occupationally:
"I would guess the second season, because it was 25 episodes long and you can't compete with that in terms of job security and knowing what you're capable of. In the third season, we did some great things, but it was also only 13 episodes and it started with the network saying 'Oh, you're not on the air anymore.'"
"The fifth season, I'm really proud of, too, and I feel about the same way about that as I do the third season, but we'll never get back to that point where we'll feel like, 'Hey! We're like 'The Office!' NBC wants 25 episodes of our show per year! We know such and such an episode is going to be airing at Christmas, so let's give people a good Christmas episode!' You can't compete with that."
Harmon's memory is a little fuzzy on this because season 3 did have 22 episodes, though it infamously had a strange release where episode 10 aired on December 8, 2011, and episode 11 didn't air until March 15, 2012. But he had a full season. I agree with Harmon that season 2 was the show's finest, finding the perfect balance of indulging in and subverting the tropes of the sitcom. They were in a groove, which the business had to kill.