At some point, I think, Community is going to have to decide how ambitious it wants to be: is it going to go deeper into its characters, or is it going to be a sitcom that figures out how many funny riffs it can do based on their static set of quirks? Neither is necessarily a bad choice, and “Contemporary American Poultry” is a pretty funny example of the latter, putting the now-familiar eccentricities of its surrogate study-group family into a meticulously executed, extended Goodfellas parody. There were innumerable fine touches, from the Scorsese-like use of “Layla” on the soundtrack to the campus-paper headline (“STAR-GATE! HEADLINE IN REFERENCE TO WATERGATE, NOT THE 1994 FILM”). But one quibble: how do you do a Goodfellas parody about a cafeteria and not do a long tracking shot through the kitchen?
