WRAP PARTY: COMMUNITY SEASON 3

Season 3 of Community began with the video above.  A musical piece that shouts "we're gonna be less crazy" to the audience.  That musical piece couldn't have been more of a lie.  It could definitely be debated which season has traveled to the most extreme portals of insanity, but Season 3 definitely wasn't any less crazy as the cast promised in the opening minute of the season.

THE HIGHLIGHTS

S3 Ep2-Geography of Global Conflict:  One of my favorite episodes of the season.  It features Martin Starr (Roman from Party Down or @mkrenek) as professor of a Political Science class named Professor Cligoris.  Annie competes in a Model UN against an Asian Annie lookalike named Annie Kim.  Parks and Recreation also did the Model UN bit this season, and it really worked for both of them.  Oh yeah, Britta gets tasered by Chang.  Awesome!

S3 Ep4-Remedial Chaos Theory:  To me, one of the most unique episodes in television history.  A series Top 5 for me, and probably one of the more critically acclaimed episodes of Community's brief existence.  The episode features the main 7 at a party at Troy and Abed's house.  A game of Yahtzee turns into an episode that consists of different time lines.  Their game of Yahtzee is interrupted by the pizza delivery man.  The group  rolls the die to see who has to leave the table and go downstairs to get the pizza.  I guess you could say laziness is the beginning huge factor of the episode, but that's beside the point.  This is such a hard episode to explain, but in the end we find out that when Jeff leaves to get the pizza, everyone is happy.  When Troy leaves to get the pizza, the group goes crazy.  We learn in the tag that Pierce is dead, Shirley is an alcoholic, and Annie is in a mental ward.  Luckily, that wasn't the actual timeline.  It's confusing.  Just watch it.

S3 Ep5-Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps:  Each member of the group tells a spooky story, while Britta tests them and the results have shown that one member of the group is insane.  This also features the jazz hit (and theme song for "Saxual Intercourse") from Michael Haggins that you can see in Episodes 14 and 15 of Cirque TV.

S3 Ep8-Documentary Filmmaking: Redux: The gang is asked to be actors and participate on the crew for a new commercial that Greendale is creating.  Things get loony when The Dean progressively loses his mind during the filming of the spot.  It's shot from the POV of Abed.  After watching this episode I realized Dan Harmon was telling us what we would soon learn about the way he runs things.  In the episode The Dean goes over budget, the production of the commercial goes incredibly longer than expected, and to top it off,  during the shooting of the episode Pierce plays the role of a diva and storms off the set.  We would later learn that this has actually happened more than during shooting of other episodes.  Also, adding to the aura of this sensational episode, this originally aired the week NBC announced that it had benched Community, causing an out roar of rage towards NBC among the hardcore fans like myself.

S3 Ep10-Regional Holiday Music: SNL's Taran Kilam guest stars as a glee class teacher.  He begs the members of the group to join the glee club, and eventually brainwashes them into joining one by one.  This episode is a direct shot at Glee.  In the end, we find out that the instructor of the Glee Club actually is a murderer.  This was the last episode before Community when on it's hiatus, so I think I also viewed this episode more closely than others just because I didn't know when the next episode of Community would air.

I thought the second half of Season 3 was much weaker than the first, but it still had some really solid episodes.

We find ourselves now awaiting Season 4, set to return in the fall of 2012.  One would think things will be much different. as the creator and mastermind of the series Dan Harmon has been relieved of duties as show runner.  Show runners getting replaced is not an unusual thing in TV land, but there aren't many show runners who possessed creative control like Harmon did with Community.  NBC ordered 13 episodes for Season 4, but I would expect that order to get extended because not many of the new programs coming to NBC look promising.  That's probably just me looking at this thing with the glass half full though.