A quick review of this week's “Community” coming up just as soon as I improvise pockets…
Because “Community” has done so many different pastiche episodes where the cast has to dress up in silly costumes and walk through a very different version of Greendale, it can be easy to miss how many different levels those installments tend to work on. But the best of those outings have some kind of emotional story to ground all the cosplay, and even the next tier of them are executed so well in their specific areas of parody that they're still satisfying.
“Intro to Recycled Cinema,” unfortunately, operated almost entirely on the superficial level of putting the actors in goofy costumes and letting crazy things happen around them. There were brief stabs at turning the production of the terrible movie into emotional stories for Abed (who wasn't happy he was being asked to make something so awful by design) and Jeff (who saw in the movie a way to temporarily escape his Greendale life sentence), but the former was dropped too quickly, while the latter wasn't set up enough to feel real.
There were isolated funny moments (Ken Jeong's delivery of Chang's “HAAAAAAAAM, GIRL!!!” catchphrase, Annie and Britta's ongoing argument about feminism and the paying of the rent, Garrett's #WhoIsGlipGlop t-shirt), but on the whole, this one felt awfully thin, even with a guest appearance by Dan Fienberg's favorite actor, Steve Guttenberg.
What did everybody else think?