In the interview, Joel McHale said it took about eight days to shoot the 23-minute episode. He explained:
“You’d walk into the cafeteria, and they’d turned it upside down; there was a fire in it. And it was the most physical episode I’ve done, with the jumping and the stunts; it was like a boyhood fantasy of being in an action movie. They hired a paintball company and brought them in to shoot up the place. They just kept handing us loaded paintball gun after loaded paintball gun.”
Of course there was a fire in the cafeteria. That poor school went through a whole lot in those six seasons. Still, this was the first season, and no one was really expecting the show to produce an episode like this. It was already meta and full of pop culture references, but this one showed how far “Community” was willing to take its comedy. “Modern Warfare” is, in my opinion, one of the best of the entire series, though the second season’s paintball episode was pretty darn funny as well.
It was also notable for the hook-up between Jeff and Britta, which “Community” had been teasing. The beginning of season 1 set up a hot character will they/won’t they scenario for these two, but their characters got weird (read: awesome) really quickly, and a regular old sex scene just wouldn’t do. This was the “wounded soldier” fantasy, as Britta says. It was fantastic, but it also had the result of killing that tension trope and switching everything around. That scene was also why poor Joel McHale had a crash course in toning up quickly.
