Community, 'Remedial Chaos Theory'
Community loves itself some stunt episodes — movie parodies, flashbacks, the paintball-action subgenre — but the best among them are ones like this, which use a cool concept foremost as a way to develop the characters. Here, the study group meets at Troy and Abed's new apartment for a housewarming. They order pizza, and when it arrives, Jeff rolls a six-sided die to determine who will meet the delivery guy. What follows is an episode with seven different timelines — six, plus one in which Jeff doesn't roll the die at all — whose events change radically depending on which character leaves the room. The intricately constructed narrative's complexity makes Lost look like Dora the Explorer, but it's all for a larger purpose: showing, by subtraction, what each person contributes to the dynamic and thus what makes Community a community.