Modern Warfare: Defying Conventions

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]I I I don't know how to talk about this episode, which is maybe one of the uh best episodes of network television that's ever been created before. So, I struggled a lot with this script. So, you know, let's go.

[00:00:19]So, here's a thing that happened. In May 2010, a network sitcom about a community college, a show that was losing its time slot to a procedural about singing teenagers, aired an episode that changed how television comedy works. not metaphorically, not change the conversation, but actually changed the structural grammar of what a sitcom episode is allowed to be and operated at such high levels, making it look effortless along the way. And it did it with paintball. The episode is Modern Warfare. It's season 1, episode 23 of Community. It currently holds a 9.8 an eight out of 10 on IMDb with over 16,000 votes, making it arguably the highest rated sitcom episode on the platform.

[00:01:06]Time named it one of the top three episodes of 2010, and TV Guide put it on their list of 65 best episodes in television history. So, let's talk about Modern Warfare, the story, the deeper meaning, and the critical reaction to it.

[00:01:22]>> Jeff and Brit has no Ross and Rachel.

[00:01:24]Your sexual tension and lack of chemistry are putting us all on edge.

[00:01:26]>> Just like Sam and Diane. I hated Sam and Diane.

[00:01:29]>> Our cold opening is doing a lot of work here as always. They start off in the study room with Abed who works as a show's conscience and narrator and prophet names the Jeff and British situation directly. Ross and Rachel with Shirley joining in on a reference to Sam and Diane which ask your dad.

[00:01:47]>> Okay, we get it. You're young. Now, this framing is playing with the metal layer of audience expectations for sitcom will they won't they. We all know how this goes. The writers know that you're waiting for it. They want you to be aware that you're waiting for it. This idea that uh will Jeff and Britta hook up. And what happens if they do? This is like kind of a a central tension in sitcoms. And it's a it's a thing. In most cases, they fight through hell to balance audience expectations, to delay the gratification, both physically and metaphorically speaking. And they do that by giving wild subplots to further embellish this romantic tension while they take these characters on a journey, never really letting them get to that point until the very end of the series or acknowledge at least at some point that if you do so, [music] it's going to die. you're your this thing that is fueling the show is going to die because the characters had sex. And so they take these characters on wild rides and writers have to write wild stories to keep these characters from hooking up and enter a wild story.

[00:03:00]>> There's also going to be a game of paintball assassin with a prize for last man standing.

[00:03:05]>> Well, just the setup for it. And Troy's reaction to TBD might be my favorite joke in an episode full of that might be my favorite joke. I want TBD. Is that new?

[00:03:14]>> Either way, too cool for school, Jeff makes his way out to his car to take a nap. And I think this bit works exceptionally well, but I I also think that it was structured to come back from a commercial break, which would have given the audience this idea of like, did I accidentally change the channel?

[00:03:29]Are we still on Community? That's because Jeff wakes up on a campus that looks a lot like the opening of 28 Days Later or The Walking Dead, which came out like 5 months later. The comics were around enough. Anyway, Jeff stumbles upon Garrett in this case serving as the uh Morgan type uh person who exposits on the collapse of Greenale's civilization.

[00:03:51]>> We we turn ON EACH OTHER LIKE LIKE ANIMALS. Garrett is doing the Lord's work here as uh Morgan uh where again it's not Morgan but like it's a trope like he's a victim of this world explaining the new world order to the uninitiated person before being shot in this case by Leonard flanking on his left leaving Jeff on the run as the show enters like a a different little subtle genre shift because we're not doing zombies we're we're we're doing like everything materializes from around the corner corner in slow motion wearing Riddic goggles in a homemade tactical kit that uh holds chapstick and he effortlessly dispatches Leonard and delivers to Jeff's shocked face. A line lifted almost verbatim from Terminator 2.

[00:04:38]>> Come with me if you don't want paint on your clothes.

[00:04:40]>> Come with me if you want to live.

[00:04:41]>> I bet services then for a while as the Terminator in this world. someone who gets it, sees through stuff, understands how humans work enough to be able to protect the reluctant hero, who in this case, John Connor, is Jeff. They return to Troy, who's been holed up in the Spanish room. Troy sporting his football pads, a nod to his jock identity, and it kind of reads like a MadMax 2 scavenger punk thing going on. And he greets Jeff with Jeff Wing. You son of a [ __ ] >> Which is our first Predator illusion.

[00:05:14]This time the Carl Weather's Schwarzenegger greeting without the masculine, you know, >> Dylan, >> you son of a [ __ ] >> Anyway, Glover's delivery of this line is is like sincere and [music] oddly moving and funny. It It's It's maybe my favorite moment in this episode. Anyway, the three of them then take out the chess club in about 30 seconds. Jeff reading the tactical situation realizes that the lone chess player is bait. And honestly, I'm a sucker for dad jokes, so these puns might be the funniest line in this episode. Sorry, guys. I'm going to stop. [laughter] He's a pawn. Checkmate, [ __ ] [music] Down the hall, they run into Pierce, who's been slumming it up with Starburns. Someone with no remorse he betrays in a heartbeat just to rejoin the study group, even though he didn't have to. More on this later. The three head into the men's room with Pierce uh I guess standing guard to do their business as this episode's play on the ambush recognition scene uh plays out with uh some great set design and you get this little drip of green ooze which might be playing on the Alien franchise.

[00:06:30]Not sure about that one. This ambush though is the other side of the study group with Annie yelling out a TBPG friendly cuss word as she exits the garbage.

[00:06:39]The men turn around from their urinals with their guns drawn, resulting in a Mexican standoff, which is only resolved when the group turns on Jeff and Britta for uh flirt fighting again. I will say I think that the fact that the girls are in the uh restroom is in a is a is a call back to an earlier episode. So, that's cool. With the Green Dale 7 reunited, which I think is the first time the show calls them that. Every group in this episode is like a different click. Uh, and they head outside where the glee club is acting like a siren calling sailors with their sultry harmonies.

[00:07:19]>> Oh, brother.

[00:07:20]>> And I do think that this is the episode's sharpest running gag. In the apocalypse, every faction becomes its own gang, and their tactics mirror suit.

[00:07:30]Chess club is sacrificing the pawn. the glee kids up in the tree, the disco kids that we'll run into soon. It all just it works. It works really well.

[00:07:39]>> WRITE SOME ORIGINAL SONGS. NOW, IN THE FREY, Troy is shot after he angered God.

[00:07:44]Annie's boobs are taken out. The boobs, not the monkey. And as heartlessly as Pice turned on Starburns, Jeff turns on Pierce. both playing into the series subtext of PICE serving as this destination for Jeff if he doesn't change his ways as well as this episode's deeper question of like what makes someone intrinsically good. Is it doing something good for people that makes you good or is it your motives and desires behind doing something good that makes you good? A question that I don't think this episode answers uh but the good place has a lot of thoughts on it. Here we get our second predator call back as a study group aims for the trees.

[00:08:24]>> In the trees.

[00:08:29]>> There's something in those trees.

[00:08:38]The survivors of this bout, Jeff, Britta, Abed, and Shirley, retreat to the cafeteria and sit around a trash can bonfire in what is the most efficiently developed action movie beat in this episode. The huddle around the fire and confess your dreams scene exists in approximately every action film that has something to do with like how the characters are ever going to get out of this situation. Here it is doing double duty. It both serves as the parody and genuine emotional development simultaneously. Shirley explains that she wants morning classes so that she can be home with her boys in the afternoon. Brida doing what Brida does immediately tries to make this uh like a moral statement by suggesting that whoever wins should give the prize to Shirley. Jeff calls her phony. And in this case, that argument is actually about something, something we'll get to in the deeper meaning. Just then, Disco Stew's gang rolls up. We get the most Warriorsesesque vibe here.

[00:09:46]>> Where Shirley starts this monologue in the key of maybe Book of Eli or Saving Private Ryan. I mean, either way, she's quoting scripture and it's a religious thing and she's a a woman of quiet faith who's been pushed past her limits and then she gets shot. She delivers her exit line with uh it's it's a good moment.

[00:10:06]>> I'm going home, Britta.

[00:10:08]>> I know, surely. I know.

[00:10:10]>> No. Uh seriously, I'm going home.

[00:10:12]>> Abed is a hit off camera, which is maybe the least satisfying thing uh from this episode, leaving only two and also I don't get this reference. So, if someone want to fill like fill me in on that one, >> Alex, it just leaves only two players left in the game. Jeff is injured though and the duo make it back to the heart of the show, the study room. This is where Community's lifeblood and energy pumps and so it's metaphorically ripe uh for the story here because this is where it all happens. And as Brida stitches Jeff back together, they continuously make meta references about the hopelessness of their romantic situation, parodying the audience's expectation that at some point these characters are going to do it. And then they do it. Meanwhile, in a deanly lit office, we learn that the dean didn't have authority to actually award the students with the prize he promised. And to fix his problem without having to own up to it, he unleashes the Chang, a paintball enthusiast, which might be the worst kind of enthusiast.

[00:11:22]Not sure. As Jeff and Brida clean up, there's a reset as these two characters revert back to their previous places with Brida being the first to turn on Jeff only to find out that he already turned on her and uh took Diehard style removed the clip. Uh-oh.

[00:11:40]No paintballs, Hans. What do you think I'm stupid?

[00:11:43]>> Oops.

[00:11:46]No bullets. You think I'm [ __ ] stupid, Hans?

[00:11:49]>> That die hard illusion only becomes cleaner the dirtier Jeff's wife beater gets. Anyway, the double cross is interrupted by Chang wearing a white suit, shades, and a matchstick, firing one-handed with a tiger striped automatic paint gun, which may be a nod to the actual video game Modern Warfare, all to the strains of a Chinese classical piece, underscoring his entrance. And the outfit is somewhere between Tony Montana and Scarface and Xiaoan Fat and uh The Killer. [music] [singing] In the DVD commentary, Harmon and Co talked about how far out of their way they went to keep the mind veering to actual school shootings and to keep this in the land of playful fun. Uh, which I thought about every time I saw somebody get shot with a paintball because that hurts. And it all is, it's pretty fun.

[00:12:39]And as Chang whips out his dual wielded golden pistols in the manner of Caster Troy from Face Off, which is the only film my dad ever walked us out of the theater from due to violence, which I don't know why he even brought us there in the first place. Cut to I hate to see you go, but I love to watch you leave.

[00:12:56]>> Jeff and Brida are back to bickering, but this case they want to know who's going to sacrifice themselves for the others so that they can take out Chang and maybe lose in the process. Uh, this case, Brida gets the upper hand and she has a slow motion face off uh with Cheng. And I've heard some people say this is like a Matrix inspired thing. I think it could also be some of these uh John Woo type stuff. I don't I don't know. I do think this bullets hitting each other thing is from Wanted.

[00:13:28]Either way, they're both out of the game. And uh Chang, who is unhinged from defeat, activates a paint bomb vest uh while delivering the Predator's self-destruct laugh. [laughter] [laughter] He detonates it, leading to this episode's money shot.

[00:13:52]Jeff and a dirty wife beater limping, sweating, walks into Dean Pelton's office. It's like a visual quote here, like I said, of John Mlan arriving to the final showdown in Nakatomi. Uh, Pelton's office, by the way, is full of Dalmatians now. It's like a seasonl long running gag that's been building since, I think, episode 2. It requires no explanation except that it's the Dean.

[00:14:16]>> He makes me uncomfortable.

[00:14:17]>> Anyway, Jeff shoots up the place in what feels like a Rambo 2 nod. Then he drops his rifle and fakes compliance just to shoot Dean in the forehead.

[00:14:28]And again, that would hurt and leave a bruise for quite a while. Almost.

[00:14:34]Later that morning, the school is immaculate. It's completely clean and exactly as it was, almost to make you wonder if any of this really happened.

[00:14:42]if there was an unreliable narrator situation, only for the conversation of Jeff and Brida's extracurriculars to be equally expuned, which also works on this level where if you replace paint for some other bodily excretion, >> you still have some uh paint.

[00:14:58]>> Oh, thanks.

[00:14:59]>> Anyway, upon entering the paintless study room, Abed knows something's up.

[00:15:03]Uh but he can't quite put his finger on it. Jeff offers the priority registration to Shirley, surprising everyone, including himself. Uh, which is a great time to dive into the [music] >> MY [screaming] EMOTIONS. IN CASE YOU'RE JOINING us for the first time here, here's the thing about Dan Harmon. He is a guy who studied story structure obsessively enough to develop his own framework, the story circle. His adaptation of Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, which he uses as the internal architecture of almost every episode of Community. The story circle goes something like this. A character is in their ordinary world. They want something. They enter an unfamiliar situation. They adapt to it. They get what they wanted. They pay a heavy price for it. They return to the ordinary world, but they are changed. What I think is amazing is that Modern Warfare is running the story circle twice, simultaneously on two different narrative frequencies. The first circle is an action movie. Jeff wakes up into chaos, which is the unfamiliar situation, forms alliances, fights his way into the dean's office, gets what he wants, gives the prize away, which is paying the price, and he returns to the clean hallway, but he is changed. The second story circle is the sitcom level where Jeff and Britta have been orbiting each other all season. The cold opening names this explicitly. Their unresolved television romantic tension is blocking the group from becoming what they really need to be to reach friends level of success. The will they won't they dynamic is the sitcom's most [music] reliable engine. Like we were talking about earlier, it monetizes friction and it keeps people watching for this promising resolution that if the writers ever give it to them, it kills the show.

[00:16:53]Network television had turned this into an institutional habit to delay gratification. Can't use that joke twice, but I did. Modern warfare is blowing this trope up. So, the genius of this is that by wrapping the season's central romantic beat inside of an action movie genre, a genre where sex is relatively consequence-free and temporary alliances dissolve with the firefight, the episode is able to consummate that tension, reset the characters, and decline to make it mean what the sitcom rule book says it has to mean. Jeff and Britta have sex. They try to shoot each other. They agree to say nothing. life continues. The show refuses to give the audience the romantic payoff that they've been conditioned to expect, and it does it in a way that feels emotionally honest rather than evasive. Sometimes two people who just like each other, do a thing in an extreme situation and then go back to just being normal people. The action movie just gives them permission.

[00:17:56]Then the school is clean. The story circle closes almost back to where they started, having learned something along the way. This reset, the overnight clean campus, the unspoken agreement is the structural joke and the emotional truth of the episode held in the same hand.

[00:18:14]The school being immaculate the next morning is physically absurd. Paint obviously takes days to [music] clean.

[00:18:20]The 28 Days Later opening implied a biological apocalypse worth of damage.

[00:18:25]But the narrative required a reset. So there's a reset. The show doesn't pretend otherwise. It just does it because Harmon understood that the story circle return to the ordinary world beat is not about pretending nothing happened. It's about inhabiting a changed person [music] in an unchanged world. The campus stays the same, but the characters are [music] not. Also, the prize is fake. Everybody out there is shooting each other for nothing.

[00:18:58]>> This is the payload of this entire episode. It's delivered so casually that it almost just goes by. Chang reveals before a suicide bomb before a suicide paint bomb that priority registration isn't a thing. The dean also confirms it. There is no prize. There never was.

[00:19:15]The entire apocalypse is caused by people fighting over something worthless, which of course is the point.

[00:19:22]Battle Royale, like a 2000 film that I think Modern Warfare has a lot of parallels with, at least in the topline structure, is about a government that turns school children against each other as a mechanism for self-control. The horror of the film isn't just the violence. It's the arbitrariness.

[00:19:40]The rules are invented. The prize is just compliance. Modern Warfare translates this into Greenale's administrator invents a prize that doesn't exist. The community dissolves instantly into factions because they're all just fighting for something that's not even real. The thing that they bleed for turns out to not exist. And so that action movie surface and the sitcom sub layer are both about the same thing.

[00:20:08]Humans organizing their behavior around incentives that were never real. the genre mythology like the lone hero always wins and sitcom mythology that the tension resolves into romance.

[00:20:23]They're both promises that culture makes that culture never keeps. But Jeff is not a character who settled with this world and with the narrative structure as it is and forces the dean to make a new path to come up with something of value for all the work he's put in.

[00:20:39][music] And it gives them a new path forward. And in doing that, in the final beat of the episode, in almost silence with no real speech or charisma or anything else, he becomes what Britta says he was earlier in the episode, a person who helps people more than he wants to admit, even though he doesn't think he's a good person. The story circle returns him back to the ordinary world, but he is andarguably better than he was, which is great. But is this a good episode of Community? Yes.

[00:21:10]Thanks for watching. What Modern Warfare proved, and why I think critics have been writing about this show for 15 years, is that committing completely to the genre's physical grammar doesn't dilute character, it reveals it. This was something that we talked about in the contemporary American poultry episode. The genre enhances the story.

[00:21:33]It It doesn't take away from it. Every film reference in this episode is also a character note. Jeff is John Mlan because Jeff is ordinary and resourceful and reluctant and good despite himself.

[00:21:46]Abed is the Terminator because Abed calculates the genre better than he understands people. And it's in that genre he is most himself. Cheng gets the John Woo entrance because Cheng has this ego and nowhere to put it. And an action film is the only place where that energy makes this much sense. Each reference earns its place. None of them are just decoration. The AV Club gave this an A.

[00:22:09]IGN gave it a 9.7. Time put it on its top three episodes of 2010. TV Guide 65 best episodes in television history.

[00:22:17]IMDb's 9.8 is a rating that series finales of prestigious dramas would kill for. This episode was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Justin Lynn's direction. Lynn, who was between Fast and Furious and Fast Five when he shot this, imported his feature film action vocabulary wholesale into a 22minute NBC comedy about a community college. The Russo brothers, who directed season 2's paintball finale, widely seen as the spiritual sequel to this episode, were hired later by Marvel to direct Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Partly on the strength of that work, the chain of cause and effect that leads from a paintball game at Greenale Community College to some of the biggest franchises in acclaimed [music] American cinema is real and documented.

[00:23:08]Even if I hate Fast and Furious, contemporary American poultry walked so that Modern Warfare could run, which is a wild thing to say because I do know that this was shot out of order, which means that this episode would have come earlier in the season. But regardless, every concept episode that followed this, whether it's the zombie Halloween or the stopmotion Christmas or Kin Burns documentary or the Law and Order one or the 8-bit video game one or the hot lava floor one, every one of them exists because Modern Warfare demonstrated with precision that a sitcom could be about anything without ceasing to be about something. And not a moment is wasted in Modern Warfare. Everything is layered and drenched in meaning, reference, and occasional double entandra. It is the proof of concept for a kind of television that takes its audience seriously. And it trusts them to hold the genre reference [music] and the genuine feeling at the same time. To laugh in an homage and still feel the weight of Jeff handing that form to Shirley without saying more about it than it needs to. The prize was fake, but the episode was not. So, I'm going to give this one a 10 out of 10. But that's just what I think about Modern Warfare. Leave your thoughts in the comments. Let me know what references I missed because I'm pretty sure I missed a lot. Like this one. I This has to be a reference to something. Either way, join me next time as we cover English as a second language. If you like what we're doing here, like these fine folks, you can support the channel. Uh links are in the description. And I want to thank them for keeping the lights on around here and keeping my editor editing.