Community-"Intro to Political Science"

Greendale has a presidential debate on "Community"
Credit: NBC

My review of tonight's episode of Community is after the jump.

This week Community makes fun of politics. Tonight's episode of Community was fun in its own way.  It had great character moments and great jokes. Community is normally about how these characters react in a situation but this week it seemed like the jokes dominated. I have no problem with this because it was a very fun episode of television that I enjoyed watching.

The center of the episode was Greendale needing to elect a president because Joe Biden is coming to town on his Community College tour. This was a plotline that allowed the show to make fun of everything from a political election. It targets everything from nominations by applause, to the debate where everything is completely over the top, to political TV coverage, to the types of candidates, to the winner. This episode targeted everything it could, and it did this really well. The parody was very funny because it was able to target the politics and successfully fit the characters into the storyline, which is what Community is the master of, fitting characters into a storyline.

Jeff got to play the role of the candidate that spoke very well and had nothing substantive to say. He played off the popularity card. He only joined the race to spite Annie and acted as the perfect antithesis for Annie. He had no substance and him having no substance to the debate was absolutely hysterical. Anything that he said was funny because he wasn't really saying anything. The show used him perfectly to make fun of these candidates.

Annie played the role of the candidate who wanted to change something. She joined the election so that she could change the school and ran on that platform. She was clearly the only one with substance and the show used that to its advantage. In the debate, anything that Annie said was funny because she was the only one saying anything. Also, her pulling Jeff's "Real World: Seattle" audition was a cruel, but hysterical move.

The show also used this episode to further the Jeff and Annie relationship, not romantically but personally. The episode was filled with good moments with the best one coming at the end of the episode. Joel McHale and Allison Brie work so well together that anything they do together works really well. That scene had so much heart that it worked really well.

The episode also gave Troy and Abed great material. Those two made great political news anchors. Every scene with the two of them together worked like a charm. It made fun of how political news broadcasts work very well.

Abed seems to always be the one who gets a sidestory (As the show cleverly noted). This time it involved him befrending a secret service agent who is played by Eliza Coupe. It was a cute relationship that worked really well and was very funny. Her agent strictness almost made me angry but it didn't cross the line with how strict she was. It also gave us the great tag.

Some other thoughts:

• Again, Pierce wasn't really funny, he only pissed me off.
• The Pop-Pop vs Raspberry debate between Magnitude and Leonard was great
• The Dean's outfit successfully traumatized me. 
• Loved how "South Park" is now the president of Greendale and how Troy and Abed both voted for it.
• The news crawl on Greendale's network could be an episode in itself great stuff.
• Good Britta moment in the nominations, apparently she's an anarchist.
• Loved the non-Biden appearance
• The Abed score was great, as was Troy's tally ("notches")
• "We can make Greendale acceptable to the western 3/4 of Greendale's area!"
• "It's almost as if politics was a huge joke"

Overall, a very good episode of Community that relied on funny jokes and good parody.

What did everyone else think?