NBC

At its warmest, Community takes apart its misfit-toy characters — adult learners at the nation’s worst community college — to see what makes them hurt and what makes them tick. At its weirdest, it takes apart the very form of TV comedy, experimenting with new ways to tell funny stories in a half-hour. And at its best, it does both at the same time. Here, crotchety Pierce (Chevy Chase) has to confront the legacy of his controlling, racist father by competing with the rest of the crew in a Nintendo-style virtual-reality video game to earn his inheritance. That the episode could make an emotional connection with its characters mostly drawn as 8-bit avatars is a testament to how well imagined the show’s world has become. At the end of Season 3, Community‘s mad-genius creator was forced off the show by NBC, but this late episode may have been the series’ best ever.

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