The first season of “Community” started off a fairly conventional sitcom and grew increasingly experimental. Alison Brie, who played the young studious Annie Edison, told The Independent that the season’s 23rd episode, “Modern Warfare,” was a “tipping point” that proved the show was “so much more than a network comedy.”
“The paintball episode in the first season was so fun,” Brie said. “It just blew our minds like, ‘Oh, I didn’t think you could do this on a network comedy.'” The episode transformed the show’s community college setting into an apocalyptic wasteland, where the characters shot at each other with paintball guns. In lesser hands, the premise could’ve easily made for a “Happy Days”-style jump the shark episode, but instead, it impressed critics and enthralled fans.
The paintball war wasn’t some extended dream sequence, either. The episode established that all this madness could exist within the reality of the show. “Community” grew even more ambitious in the upcoming seasons, offering high-concept episodes based around “Law & Order,” or the idea of parallel timelines. As crazy as the show became, however, it was “Modern Warfare” that stuck out most in much of the cast and crew’s memories. Gillian Jacobs told fans in an Ask Me Anything thread on Reddit that it was her favorite episode. In a 2012 interview with the AV Club, Dan Harmon said, “I look at ‘Modern Warfare,’ and I go, ‘This should be hanging in a museum, this is a perfect piece of television.'”
Community decided not to run the paintball premise into the ground
“There’s something special about [the paintball episodes],” said Alison Brie in a behind-the-scenes clip for “A Fistful of Paintballs” in Season 2. The Season 1 paintball episode was directed by Justin Lin of “Fast and Furious” fame, while the Season 2 paintball two-parter was directed by Joe Russo before he joined the “Avengers” franchise. Joel McHale, who played study group leader Jeff Winger, told Vulture that the first paintball episode had been “the most fun I’ve had ever shooting anything … Justin Lin directed that brilliantly.”
Despite the love the show’s cast members expressed for the show’s paintball episodes, Dan Harmon has no intentions of returning to paintball for the “Community” movie still in development. “I think it’s one of the first things to rule out,” he said, arguing that the paintball premise is a better fit for a standalone episode than for a reunion film.
“Modern Warfare” may have been a standout episode, but Harmon told MovieWeb in 2012 that he “never felt the requirement” to keep returning to the paintball well. Season 3 would not to do its own paintball-centric episode, with Harmon saying, “I think our audience trusts us enough that, if we go a whole season and don’t do a paintball episode, they’re going to know that we must have thought it would be tired.”
