Clip show episodes are, by nature, redundant: these types of stories reduce production costs and pad a season’s episode list by creating an episode that primarily features flashbacks from previous episodes that have already been shown. Sometimes the clip show episode serves the purpose of reminding viewers what has happened up until this point or catching up viewers who might not have seen every episode.
If they run long enough, every sitcom has a clip show episode eventually. And while some can be entertaining and can even be a good way to catch up on everything that’s happened in the show so far, the redundancy of the clip show episode is still a negative point against it, making episodes like this highly skippable. Usually, nothing new happens. There typically isn’t much new footage besides the occasional short scene that features characters saying to each other, “Remember when this happened?”
Community, on the other hand, made an incredibly creative clip show by subverting the very nature of this type of episode in Season 2, Episode 21, “Paradigms of Human Memory.” In short, no previously used footage was included in the series of mini recaps. None of the clips have ever been shown before, and most of them are completely new circumstances, with a few minor exceptions.
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During the final stages of a class project involving the creation of a diorama, the study group – Jeff (Joel McHale), Britta (Gillian Jacobs), Abed (Danny Pudi), Annie (Allison Brie), Troy (Donald Glover), Shirley (Yvette Nicole Brown), and Pierce (Chevy Chase), assisted by Chang (Ken Jeong) – discovers that a thieving monkey stole little trinkets from them throughout the year. The episode begins with the typical setup for a clip show by letting the characters reminisce about moments that were shown in season one and up to this point in season two, including a miniature sombrero from Jeff and Pierce’s overly ambitious Spanish project (Season 1, Episode 2, “Spanish 101”) and Annie’s purple pens from the bottle episode (Season 2, Episode 8, “Cooperative Calligraphy”).
The very inclusion of Troy’s monkey harkens back to the chicken mafia family the study group formed in Season 1, Episode 21 (“Contemporary American Poultry”). Any regular clip show episode would launch into a series of short flashbacks from here, using footage previously shown. But Community branches off from that expectation very early.
When Britta brings up the time the group visited an Old West tourist town, the clip that the episode cuts to is completely new. Casual viewers who didn’t watch all the episodes leading up to this one might not even realize this, but the Old West adventure that keeps being brought up actually never happened on camera before. The same goes for the Saint Patrick’s Day misadventure, the jump rope game in the cafeteria, and many other, increasingly out-of-the-blue and odd circumstances, like a haunted mansion and a padded cell.
Though the flashback clips are quick, and the characters behave as though the experience was shown, there are also circumstances included in the clip show that aren’t entirely new. Abed’s mental breakdown from Season 2, Episode 12 (“Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas”) is revisited, but instead of showing material that viewers are already familiar with, these moments are revisited from different angles. The first flashback shows the study group walking Abed through the winter wonderland in live-action, even though the Christmas special this was pulled from was entirely stop-motion animated. The second flashback shows the same animation but extends one of the scenes to include flirting between Jeff and Britta.
This out-of-the-box approach to the clip show episode is not without reason. “Paradigms of Human Memory” prioritizes character work, so there is a complete and dynamic story thread weaving throughout the episode. When Abed exposes Jeff and Britta’s secret affair, the study group is forced to come to terms with their chaotic brand of friendship and how they might work around toxic fighting. The flashbacks are used as evidence to support certain characters’ arguments, providing a fun framework and reason for the flashbacks’ existence. Abed launches into a series of clips that point to Jeff and Britta being together, the study group as a whole brings up all the times Jeff and Britta put themselves before the group, and Britta provides evidence that everyone has at some point been selfish. Even the Dean (Jim Rash) becomes a victim of the group's increasingly aggressive flashback fights.
The jabs get more personal (and the flashbacks more stylistic and hilarious) as Annie describes seemingly mundane and normal interactions with Jeff through the lens of her crush on him as “Gravity” by Sara Bareilles plays throughout the montage. To make a point, Jeff does the same thing with interactions between the most random pairing, Abed and Pierce, and the same song is used, turning the romantic montage parody into a parody of itself.
“Paradigms of Human Memory” has a way of spiraling into multiple levels of chaos. As the group laments that they always fight, the flashbacks become steps backward in time to past arguments and how they always end the same way. This type of inception-level spiraling is too much for Troy, who screams and suffers a nosebleed, but this direction for the episode was foreshadowed well in the very first scene, where the study group’s diorama is shown to be a diorama of themselves building another diorama.
While the clips are short and have a similar feeling to the regular clip show, they are completely new and weave together to form a cohesive idea of how the study group interacts with each other, highlighting its most dysfunctional moments as well as its most heartwarming ones. Thankfully, Jeff is able to take control of the situation, as always, but even the classic Winger speech is subverted: because it is spread out across different levels of clip show flashbacks, Jeff’s speech becomes incomprehensible nonsense. But it doesn’t really matter what he says; the fact that Jeff brings things back to the status quo is what matters because there is peace within the study group again.
This one episode can be seen as a point of reference that indicates how Community walks a fine line between being your average sitcom and breaking all the rules. Nearly every storytelling element included in clip shows, as well as some of Community’s own tropes, are subverted in some way. This turns the clip show episode, which has earned a reputation of being non-creative, into a unique experience. Unlike many other clip show episodes from series past and present, these subversive elements make "Paradigms of Human Memory" unmissable.
