Tuned In

TV Tonight: There Will Be Paint

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NBC

Since Community debuted, viewers have gone two ways on its pop-culture referentiality—actually, this viewer right here has felt both ways, often within the same episode. It can be hilarious; and it can be too much. I really like the show and think it’s only gotten better, but I love its characters as well as its meta-references, and I don’t want the latter to overwhelm the former.

Tonight’s episode, though, shows that—as in the buddy-cop movies Community recently parodied—sometimes you just gotta throw out the rule book. It’s based on a single extended pop-culture parody, and it is probably the funniest and best Community episode yet.

I don’t want to spoil too much by quoting lines and describing scenes in advance, though I am sorely tempted to. But suffice it to say that, when a campus paintball competition is enhanced by an overly attractive prize, chaos ensues. Codes of civil behavior fall away. Moral compasses are discarded. And postapocalyptic thrillers, war epics, John Woo-style gun battles and effects-laden action sequences are spoofed, brilliantly. (As is Glee, which judging by Community’s earlier diss, must be the bane of Dan Harmon’s existence.)

On the one hand, the episode is a wholesale departure from realism, but—unlike, say, some especially wacky episodes of 30 Rock or Family Guy—it doesn’t sacrifice the characters to the jokes. It even manages to satisfyingly address, head-on, the will-they-won’t-they tension between Jeff and Britta that Community introduced at the get-go. Which may be an even tougher challenge than doing an action spoof on a sitcom budget.

Watch it. And strap on your goggles. Because things are going to get painty tonight.