'Community' celebrates Halloween — sitcom style

It's a hot day at Paramount Studios, and inside the soundstages for NBC's comedy “Community, the decor looks like Halloween, but the temperature says New Year's Eve in Times Square. Part of the reason for this may be tables full of party food, if one can call edible eyeballs, fingers, skulls and assorted viscera food.

Crew people circle the platters, putting fresh morsels in place of the most wilted and discolored bits. Little, though, can improve a baby doll whose appearance defies polite description (hummus and a rubber mouse are involved).

“This is the most disturbing one here, says star Yvette Nicole Brown.

“That poor baby, star Donald Glover says. “Well, don't eat rats. That's what I tell babies. I take a picture of that and say, ‘Don't be this kid.'

The occasion is filming for the sophomore show's second annual Halloween episode, called “Epidemiology 206, airing Thursday, Oct. 28, in which a miscalculation by the dean of Greendale Community College has severe repercussions for costumed campus partyers. At some point, zombies are involved.

The area just outside the library room that is the chief meeting place for the study group at the heart of the show Shirley (Brown), Annie (Alison Brie), Pierce (Chevy Chase), Troy (Glover), Britta (Gillian Jacobs), Jeff (Joel McHale) and Abed (Danny Pudi) is decorated as a combination of a strange occult temple and a bat-infested cave. The study room itself is a forest primeval of leafless black trees hung with spider webs and strange creatures, with a table that somewhat approximates a sacrificial altar.

Whatever Greendale may lack in academic acumen its anthropology professor (Betty White) attacked Jeff, and the former Spanish teacher, Chang (Ken Jeong), now busted down to student, is trying desperately to join the study group it more than makes up for in party planning.

“No expense is spared on parties at this school, Brown says, “and yet the dean will cut corners on something important.

Of course, Halloween also means costumes, and on “Community, that doesn't usually translate to slinky vampires and sexy French maids (although Pierce did have great fake abs last year as “BeastMaster.) After donning a squirrel costume in season one, Jacobs is staying in much the same vein this time around.

“It's similar to the squirrel in certain aspects, she says of the new outfit, “in that it also looks like it could be a child's footed sleeper, modified into a costume. And my neck and my shoulders hurt again this year. I definitely have a head, and I have a tail again.

“As the line in last year's episode showed, Britta has a thing against sexy Halloween costumes ... It's very in keeping with her that she would try to find as asexual a costume as possible.

Although the script says Jeff looks “devastatingly handsome in his costume, McHale isn't really buying it. “That's why it's in the script, he says. “It would be a little harder to make the magic happen. It would take the efforts that James Cameron put into ‘Avatar.'