While discussing the second season at PaleyFest, Harmon revealed the second the place he thought he had damaged tv:
“One episode in particular that went through many, many, many emotional relationships with me was the conspiracy theories episode, the pillow fort episode. It’s something very, very strange about that genre, if you watch a cut of that episode without any of the music that our composer Ludwig Göransson did, then it -– like, you look at it, which I did with my friend Dino Stamatopoulos who plays Starburns and was a writer on the show. Sometimes I’ll watch a cut on his laptop in his little hovel where he lives, and we watched a cut of that and there was no music in it yet, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, I broke television.’ And Dino, who usually is sort of like my Yoda, he goes like, ‘Yeah, that’s not just the worst episode of “Community” ever, that’s the worst episode of television ever.'”
Watching the episode with out music might be a part of why it did not work, because the musical cues within the episode actually assist the humor, particularly in sequences when Jeff and Annie are attempting to be sleuths, or within the ultimate ridiculous “shootout” the place Annie, Jeff, and the Dean (Jim Rash) all be taught in regards to the significance of gun security, even with prop weapons.