NBC's 'Community' The Best Show You Aren't Watching

[Brian Damage]

It’s mid-September and dusk has fallen on the set of NBC’s gleefully absurd comedy Community, returning for its second season Thursday. The hallways and classrooms of the show’s college campus have been decorated for Halloween. As chains, fake bats, and bloody appendages dangle from the ceiling, a smoke machine wafts thick white fog through the library and bloody-faced extras mill about aimlessly.

Inside the study room, the show’s diverse group of Greendale Community College students—dressed as Captain Kirk, a Tyrannosaurus Rex, Glinda the Good Witch, Little Red Riding Hood, an Aliens xenomorph, a giant banana, figure skater Peggy Fleming, and, um, “sexy Dracula”—have barricaded the room against a horde of zombies hell-bent on biting their flesh.

Why aren’t you watching this show?

Community’s freshman season—and in particular high-concept episodes like “Modern Warfare” and “Contemporary American Poultry”—became a critical darling this past year, delivering a hysterical and adroit season that stretched the elasticity of the American sitcom form and recalled such beloved experimental British comedies as Spaced and The Mighty Boosh. Unfortunately, only an average of 5 million viewers a week tuned in—a paltry audience for a network series.

The show’s cast says that it’s the limitless possibilities that Community kicks up that they love most about their jobs. “It’s like living my boyhood fantasies out,” said Joel McHale (The Soup), who plays ex-lawyer Jeff Winger. “I got to be an action star for 22 minutes in ‘Modern Warfare,’ I got to be in a Scorsese movie… I can’t wait to do more of those. Last night, I was punching zombies out and being thrown through a glass window. It’s just awesome.”

Alternating between character-based explorations of identity and adulthood and mind-blowing out-there adventures (such as a campus-wide paintball war and a Goodfellas-inspired chicken fingers scheme), the freshman season of Community offered a window into a place unlike any other, where earnestness and heart were at home as much as snarkiness and pop culture references.

“Greendale is a magical place where teachers that aren’t allowed to teach in other places, or are too good to teach in other places, come to teach,” said creator Dan Harmon, speaking to The Daily Beast in a booth in the massive cafeteria set. “Where students of all ages, from all walks of life, who are either so broken or so supernaturally talented that they have no choice but to come here, come here to form their own world.”

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