Community: Dan Harmon Wants to Do Right by Fans, Cast; Script Update

Posted in: NBC, Netflix, Peacock, Preview, streaming, TV | Tagged: community, dan harmon, peacock, preview

Dan Harmon offered an update on the script for the Community movie and discussed wanting to do right by the fans and the returning cast.

Earlier this week, Chevy Chase took some time out of his interview with Marc Maron for Maron’s WTF with Marc Maron podcast to share some not-so-complimentary thoughts about his time on the series Community. But since the writers’ strike is now officially over and SAG-AFTRA (fingers crossed) is soon to follow WGA with a new deal from the AMPTP, we’re going to shift the spotlight away from Chase and back to where it belongs – the upcoming movie. That’s right – we’re talking about Peacock’s Dan Harmon & Andrew Guest-written, Joel McHale (Jeff), Gillian Jacobs (Britta), Danny Pudi (Abed), Alison Brie (Annie), Ken Jeong (Ben Chang), Jim Rash (Craig Pelton), and Donald Glover (Troy Barnes)-starring (we’re still keeping our Yvette Nicole Brown candle burning) Community: The Movie. Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter for an in-depth interview/profile, Harmon offered a brief update about the script that he and Guest were working on, noting that the two still needed “to hole up for a few days and finish the script” – a script that the duo is hoping can move forward as is, with minimal rewrites.

“I don’t want these now-superstar people, like Emmy-winning Donald Glover, who are bothering to gather out of loyalty to this thing, to come back and once again be getting blue pages run down by an intern that totally contradict what they spent all night memorizing,” Harmon said, explaining that he wants the fans and the cast to feel like the wait for the show’s return was more than worth – and to make up for how he was during the show’s original run (and his less-than-complimentary comments about the show after he left).  “I want to have a veneer of, ‘Here’s your reward.’ I don’t want them to go, like, ‘Oh, he’s learned nothing, he’s treating us like cattle again,'” Harmon added.

Dan Harmon on What Won’t Work for Community Movie

Checking in with Six Seasons and a Podcast, Harmon had some intel to share on the script (written by Harmon and Andrew Guest) for the upcoming movie. In the following highlights (you can listen to the entire episode below), Harmon addresses some of the thematic concepts that worked during the show’s run not making the cut for the film & why, and discusses why there needs to be a reason for the gang to reunite that doesn’t go down cliched routes like “class reunion.”

Community Fans Shouldn’t Expect a “Greatest Hits” Tour: “It’s a lot easier for me to rule stuff out than tell you what we’re pursuing. For instance, we go, ‘Do we really think it’d be a good idea to be a paintball episode?’ It’s one of the first things to rule out because it’s the first thing off the top of your head, and that’s an issue with the ‘Community’ movie concept. We did a lot of episodes where you are joyfully locked into a construct that isn’t a traditional sitcom narrative but is rather through the lens of David Fincher or Martin Scorsese. There were a lot of special episodes that were kind of like genre homages. The paintball thing was one of them. We tried to do a bunch more paintballs, and they were all perfectly wonderful things to do, but would anything ever capture the joy of the original paintball episode?”

Harmon On Why “Paintball” Wouldn’t Play Today, Dungeons & Dragons Out: “You’re running around with guns in a school, which was never a good idea on TV, even back then. How can we do that in a way that’s acceptable? You sit down to write the movie, and you’re like, ‘So, we’d do that, right?’ Because it’s so emblematic of what made our show special and the triumphs we had, the things we contributed as a show. Or we’d play Dungeons & Dragons for 90 minutes. I kinda gotta rule that out — maybe a better writer wouldn’t.”

Community Movie Won’t Go Reunion/Closing-the-School Route: “You’re not gonna do anything terribly clever with using the school’s demise or resurrection as a device because you don’t want too much of your movie to be spent unrecognizable. It wouldn’t be outlandish to suggest that enough time has gone by in ‘Community’ that the world, and not these characters, has changed so significantly that there’s a lot to deal with. They haven’t been together in a long time, but it’s not because they swore each other off… there’s a reason to get together, and there’s a reason they have to stay together.”

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