Community Review

Harmon built a network sitcom whose default mode is formal experiment, and the remarkable thing is how rarely the experiments read as stunts. Modern Warfare stages a paintball game as a Walter Hill siege picture, directed straight by Justin Lin, and it works because the feeling underneath is played as seriously as the pastiche is committed. Remedial Chaos Theory splits one apartment into six timelines and finds a different group dynamic in each, which is a character study wearing a gimmick.

Beneath the format play sits a genuine argument about people who have failed at everything else and are using a study group as a substitute family, and Harmon rarely lets that go soft for long. Danny Pudi carries far more than the writing credits him with, Donald Glover finds the panic under Troy, and Jim Rash builds a whole performance out of costume changes and thwarted longing. The season made without Harmon is visibly the wrong show, and the final year is a diminished thing playing to a smaller room. The best twenty episodes here are as inventive as American comedy has managed.