Is ‘Community’ The King of Sitcom Christmas Episodes?

Every year, idiosyncratic sitcom-lovers everywhere gather around the TV with a mug of hot cocoa and watch the best-ever seasonal episodes of– oh, wait, Britta’s in this?  

For a show that spent its entire six-season run constantly battling cancellation and switching out both showrunners and networks, Community pulled off some truly incredible feats of TV comedy. Dan Harmon’s cult darling about a group of eccentrics fighting to earn their associate’s degrees was, in so many meta ways, a love letter to TV itself, especially around Christmastime, when the Christian/Muslim/Jewish/Atheist/Agnostic/Jehova’s Witness/Reformed Neo Buddhist study group brought out the big (paintball) guns to celebrate TV’s favorite holiday.  

In each of the show's first four seasons, the Community Christmas episode combined heart, humor and ingenuity to form a festive storyline that eschewed convention and predictability while making us ask big questions like, “How many people has that teacher from Glee killed?”  

Much like the rest of Community Season One, the first-ever Community Christmas episode, “Comparative Religion,” was comparatively tame to what would come next. As Shirley explores the rest of the group's wildly disparate beliefs that clash with her own staunchly Christian approach to the holidays, Jeff prepares for a physical clash with a group of bullies, culminating in the festive fisticuffs and Pierce giving Jeff the Christmas gift that half the Community cast probably wanted to give Chevy Chase.  

The next year, the study group (and the NBC practical effects department) stepped it up a notch with “Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas,” a claymation trauma response in which the titular TV savant's shattered psyche got a Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer-style makeover. Featuring twists, turns and John Oliver's Christmas Pterodactyl, the stop-motion therapy experiment is as whimsical and satisfying as a claymation cookie with a perfect bite mark taken out.  

Then, of course, there's the Community Christmas tour de force “Regional Holiday Music,” in which the suspicious deaths of the entire Greendale glee club set the even-more-suspicious Mr. Rad on the study group's trail as he converts them to the cultish world of festive acapella one by one. Unfortunately for Mr. Rad, his plan is ultimately Britta'd, which, for once, is a Christmas miracle.  

Finally, there's “Intro to Knots” from the Harmon-less fourth season of Community, in which Malcolm McDowell plays the part of the Scrooge-like Professor Cornwallis as the study group attempts to seduce him into a better grade. This one is perfectly passable, but not quite as grade-A as the prior two Community Christmas episodes.  

Honestly, just between “Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas” and “Regional Holiday Music,” Community has the resume to claim the crown of Sitcom Christmas King. While there are certainly worthy competitors out there, such as It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, The Office (U.S.) and, of course, South Park's yearly holiday entry, nobody else experimented with the very idea of a holiday episode to the same degree as the Community writers, and only one show in TV history could ever pull off a Muslim claymation Christmas story that explores family trauma through the twinkling lens of psychosis.