This post contains spoilers through the November 10 episode of Community.

It’s been interesting for me how Community, a show that started with Jeff Winger as its main character, and began the formation of the study group when he met Britta, has evolved to a show that’s much more interesting about its three actual college-aged characters and much less interesting about its adults. To a certain extent I’m sorry about that: there’s a really interesting story to be told about adults who need to reset their lives, and how hard it is to do that. But I also really love Troy, Abed, and Annie, and think they’re the linchpin to the show’s best episodes, its explorations of the ritual stops on the pilgrimage to adulthood, run through a very Greendale lens.

That said, I totally appreciate the fact that this episode moved the ball forward on Shirley, at least a tiny bit, addressing the sort of aggressive resurgence of her religiosity we’ve seen this season. “I’ve seen enough episodes of Friends to know that cohabitation leads to sex, drugs, and something Parade Magazine calls Schwimmer Fatigue,” Shirley complains to Britta about Annie’s move, prompting Britta to try to prove that secular morality can go toe-to-toe with Christianity. Shirley’s dismay when she discovers that their hitchhiker believes himself to be Jesus, and when he declares, in response to Britta’s question, that marijuana “was given to us by God. It should be legal,” is pretty priceless. But it’s nice that they end up reaching a common consensus that their passenger is nuts after he says that “And now, with your permission, I’d like to sing a little song about race mixing called ‘Don’t Do It.’” The show doesn’t have to have them talk about it, but they’ve found the thing that’s just too much for both of them.

I’m less fond of the Dean’s role in this episode. His deal with Jeff has always been a little creepy, but he’s crossed the line here from slightly off to outright predator. If he’d spied on the email of a female student, using that to force her into a date, people would—rightly—be horrified. If the Dean was a woman, this would be some Fatal Attraction territory. Instead, because Jeff is a guy who is more physically imposing than the Dean and who we assume couldn’t be physically coerced by him, the show treats the Dean’s emotional coercion of him as if it’s sort of adorable. There’s no question that their “Kiss From a Rose” duet was fun (and two of the best recent moments in the series have come from study group sing-a-longs), but I’ll be pretty uncomfortable if the show treats this as if it’s no big deal. This is Quinn-tries-to-get-Shelby-declared-unfit on Glee territory: it’s just not okay to behave this way, and narratively to treat it as if this is behavior that carries no major implication for the characters.

It was counterbalanced by the fact that this was a very good episode for Troy, Abed, and Annie. I thought it was a usefully forceful reminder that there are things that are objectively desirable about being a grown-up, and that wanting them doesn’t make you dull. “”Living here’s going to be fun all the time!” Annie tells herself—as much as Troy and Abed—after the puppet show, momentarily forgetting that when things are fun all the time, they’re not necessarily that fun after a while. And Troy and Abed confess that they could really use Annie’s expertise: “There’s a couple of things that you’d help us with,” Abed tells her. “Like where does the water go in the iron?” Troy explains. “And what is the iron for?” Abed chimes in. And while I do think there’s something weird about the fact that none of these attractive young people are dating, keeping them the children in a chosen family rather than actual adults, there’s something really nice about the fact that Annie and Troy have moved past their high school dynamic, her crush on him and his total ignorance of her, to become just good, solid friends.

This post contains spoilers through the November 10 episode of Parks and Recreation.

One thing that’s struck me about Parks and Recreation as its come into its own as one of the best comedies on network television is the way it uses its supporting characters. While 30 Rock‘s essentially abandoned its supporting cast to the point of making jokes about it, and Community‘s core cast is so big that the supporting cast is mostly there for very minor moments or one-offs like the Dungeons and Dragons episode, Parks and Recreation‘s supporting characters, even if they don’t get full episodes of their own, are reasonably well-developed and used for perfect inflection points. There’s something very funny and tender about Jerry as the minor bureaucrat with the soul of an artist, the kind of guy who recommends Italian Renaissance poetry for a horse funeral and paints pictures of Leslie as a Greek goddess, who’s too nice not to help April and Andy fulfill Andy’s bucket list even though he just wants to go home to his wife’s roast, who can’t tell Chris to leave him alone even as Chris is driving him insane by pulling Jerry into Chris’s relationship with Millicent. Similarly, I love Donna as the small-town hedonist, she of the Mercedes, and the treating yourself, and in this episode, lying back, eating popcorn, and getting Chris and Anne to relive their tantric sex workshops. They reinforce the main storylines perfectly without needing to be something they’re not for the situation. It’s a very nice bit of work.

I say all this as a preface to saying that I thought this was a particularly good episode for April, one of the characters who consistently frustrates me the most on Parks and Rec but has, this season, shown real signs of promise for the future. April’s clearly very smart, but she mostly acts willfully difficult or ignorant. Because she tamps down her own capabilities and Andy’s so perpetually enthusiastic, they mostly end up averaging out and ending up in the same place, but she’s clearly smarter than he is, and I’m always curious as to what might happen to their fledgling marriage if they got out of synch. You can see flashes of that in their participation in the Model UN tournament. When Andy tells April that “I just traded Finland’s military to Kenya for 50 lions,” her momentary practicality shows through when she reminds him that “Militaries are pretty good at protecting stuff.” And she also has a really good moment with Leslie, who has regressed to high school ridiculousness with Ben. “I just wanted to say it was cool how everything fell apart in there,” April says as she and Leslie slump by the lockers, before shifting into a slightly more mature gear. “And maybe you should talk to Ben…he takes really long sadness baths and makes me late for stuff.” I think it’s a really smart move to give April and Andy a spin-off web series: I’m sort of excited to see what they’re going to grow up into.

I have to admit, I’m less compelled by the core problems in this episode than the good stuff happening at the periphery. I worry that the show’s going to spend too much time with Leslie and Ben just being stuck in romantic limbo. Leslie’s lament-disguised-as-pep-talk “Friends help you move. They drive you to the airport. Boyfriends just love you and marry you,” is a very funny line, especially signaling the high school regression of the episode. But we know she feels this way. The show is wallowing a bit. Similarly, Chris’s decision to launch a ” full-scale investigation into my relationship with your daughter, Millicent Gergich,” as he puts it to Jerry, is very funny, and in character. But it also mostly serves to resolve a position that I’ve been basically talked around to, that Chris and Anne shouldn’t actually be together and will be better off as friends. And I’m glad that Tom is back, if only for Entertainment 720 to be definitively over. But I think it’s the least interesting choice the show could have made with him: it doesn’t really expand our vision of Pawnee, something that’s going to have to happen in Leslie’s campaign anyway and could have set the stage for the very different show it’ll be if she ends up on City Council.