Valentine’s Day came early to the NBC comedies. Who handled it best?

Community: Communication Studies
While last week’s episode of Community played to all of its strengths, this week’s episode indulged all of its bad habits. It was another episode exploring the shallow relationship between Jeff and Brita. (And, is it me, or is everything we know about Brita told and not shown? I still don’t really know who she is.) Abed’s pop-culture meta-commentary was especially on-the-nose (if this were a sitcom, you’d do this—but it is a sitcom, get it!), and even Senior Chang’s antics were more frantic than funny, unlike last week’s more subtle “clearly I had no other plans fall through.”

Parks and Recreation: Galentine’s Day
This episode checked in on all of the show’s couples: Leslie and Justin, Tom and Wendy, Ann and Mark, and April, her boyfriend, his boyfriend, and Andy. (Oh, Andy. The world is not ready for “Sex Hair.”) Though things don’t really look good for any of them, the show managed to mix in a lot of sweet, touching moments alongside big laughs.

The Office: Manager and Salesman
This episode effectively ended the “Jim as co-manager” arc, resetting things so that Michael is back to being sole manager and Jim is back to salesman, a blow that’s softened by the fact that salesmen can apparently make more money than their managers. This is especially disappointing since, despite all the machinations, Jim never did anything as co-manager except make Ryan sit in the closet. That, in turn, inspired a Dwight/Ryan team-up that also didn’t go anywhere. Sometimes I think this show is ust spinning its wheels.

30 Rock: Anna Howard Shaw Day
Valentine’s Day is a holiday about loneliness and insecurity, so it’s right in 30 Rock’s strike zone. Liz schedules a root canal for Valentine’s Day thinking it’ll count as an opt-out for the holiday, only to realize that she couldn’t find anyone who cared enough about her to take her home from the surgery. Meanwhile, Jack starts dating Elizabeth Banks (!), someone who knows all his games and is better at playing them. Liz’s exes appear to her as a laughing-gas hallucination, and stick around for an over-credits bumper that should probably be considered racist but was still really, really funny.

So, who won Thursday?

There’s no question that Thursday is my TV day. The DVR fires up at 8 pm and doesn’t finish recording until 12:30 on Friday. I can last for a week just on what I record on Thursdays.

The centerpiece of this weekly marathon is obviously the NBC Thursday-night sitcoms: Community, Parks and Recreation, the Office, and 30 Rock. And, on days when I can’t sit down to watch all of them, I find it really hard to decide which ones to watch. It used to be that I’d head straight for the Office and 30 Rock, but Community and Parks & Rec have really grown into strong comedies, while conventional wisdom says that 30 Rock is slipping, and sometimes the Office is just too harsh.

This constant horse-race of the four shows jockeying to be the best each week have given me the idea for a new weekly feature: Who Wins Thursday? Each week, it’s a toss-up as to which of the four sitcoms is the best. I’m determined to crown a winner each week.

And, since I can’t wait for this week’s Valentine’s Day slate of episodes, I’m going to start with last week. The rundown:

Community: Romantic Expressionism

Jeff and Brita conspire to keep Annie from dating a “gateway douchebag,” while everyone else tries to Rifftrax b-movies in Abed’s dorm. Jeff and Brita work better as co-conspirators than each others’ romantic interests. But Troy steals everybody’s thunder in both plots, trying awkwardly to seduce Annie away from Vaughn while maintaining that his relationship with Abed is totally cool.

Parks and Recreation: Sweetums

A candy company tries to sponsor Leslie’s park, and she crusades against their high fructose corn syrup and tries to get Ron to start living a healthier life. Meanwhile, Tom Haverford gets the rest of the gang to help him move out of Wendy’s house. While it does have a hilarious cameo from “DJ Roomba,” the episode’s plot feels more like a Simpsons-style corporate parody, and b-story with Tom is a downer.

The Office: Sabre

When Michael Scott has trouble transitioning to working for Sabre, the company that bought Dunder Mifflin, he visits David Wallace. The resulting misery is the Office’s bread and butter, but I still find it difficult to watch. When working at Dunder Mifflin is demonstrated to be the better of two options, nobody wins. The b-plot involves Jim and Pam in a situation where neither of them are allowed to be cute or make silly “what?” faces.

30 Rock: Verna

Jack tries to help Jenna get over her mommy issues, which somehow don’t include the fact that Jan Hooks is her mom and looks totally frightening. While they’re walking around oblivious, Liz and Frank move in together and have a Paranormal Activity-style camera set up to show how Liz eats in her sleep. A lot of it is funny, but both plots have elements that are gross and off-putting.

So…

We will stare at you until you watch our show.

After Arrested Development and Veronica Mars and Pushing Daisies, there were a few months there where I wasn’t watching some wonderful show with the knowledge in the back of my head that I wouldn’t get as many episodes as I wanted. My TV watching was pretty much divided between the safe but not tired veterans (The Office; 30 Rock; How I Met Your Mother); the equally safe ultra-veterans (Saturday Night Live; The Simpsons); and shows that I didn’t care that much about in the scheme of things anyway (I still haven’t watched the last two or three episodes ever of The Sarah Connor Chronicles — though I maintain that the show’s two seasons tell a cooler story than Terminator 3 or Terminator 4).

Then Parks and Recreation and Dollhouse had to go and get good.

In truth, the upswing for both shows happened during their respective first seasons, last spring. In fact, I wasn’t bashing either show even in their earliest, shakiest days. For both, the disappointment seemed a matter of expectations: Park was an amusing little show in the vein of The Office that seemed like it could’ve been better given the level of talent in front of and behind the camera. Dollhouse is a Joss Whedon Experience, and his previous three shows have such vehement cult followings, some people seemed downright angry that his new one was merely entertaining and sort of cool, rather than something to cry over and make retarded Livejournal icons about. Still, there was no disputing that both shows came up a little short of their potential at first.

By the end of their first seasons, though, both Parks and Dollhouse appeared to reach some sort of creative epiphany. The Parks season finale, “Rock Show,” in which the Pawnee Parks Department goes out to see Andy (Chris Pratt) and his band (name constantly in flux), showed the ensemble really coming together, and delivered some of the show’s biggest laughs. Dollhouse did sort of kick into gear, as its creators kept promising, with its mid-season episode “Man on the Street,” with Patton Oswalt as a mourning client interrogated by crusading FBI agent Ballard (Tahmoh Penikett), but saved its best for even later, as the last two aired episodes of the season cooked with tension and humor and trippy sci-fi ideas, and the DVD-premiere postscript, “Epitaph One,” set a bunch of years in the future, was easily one of the best hours of sci-fi on TV this year. Both shows got the nod for a second year despite their middling-to-poor ratings.

Amy Poehler may not have won anything last night for SNL (although Kristin Chenoweth’s win was completely adorable and the most rewarding win of the night), but you can catch more of her tonight on Inside the Actor’s Studio.

While I would love any opportunity to see an hour-long interview with Amy (particularly with James Lipton as her overly serious foil), it’s a little odd that the show has gone from interviewing cinematic greats to less glamorous TV stars. Who happen to have shows on Bravo’s parent company — fishy…

Here’s a clip from the show (airs at 7 tonight) that contains the stuff of nightmares. I don’t want to spoil it, but James Lipton says something so weird and disturbing that you’ll need to take like four showers afterwards.

By now, pretty much all of the networks have debuted their big midseason shows. We’ve all had the chance to weigh in and judge. So, how’d everybody do?

So-so. I went to the Mother of All TV Review Aggregators (Metacritic.com) and looked at the scores for the recent premieres. Most things scored in the C- and D-range, with a couple of big failures thrown in for good measure.

After the jump, I list the shows in order from best-reviewed to worst, find a good quote from a reviewer to gave the show the same rating as its average, and (of course) weigh in about whether or not I think the aggregated score is fair.