The most recent season of the NBC comedy “Community,” its fourth, was a major disappointment for most of its fans.
Creator/showrunner Dan Harmon had been fired after season three, the likely combined result (no official reason was given) of poor ratings and a general vibe of being difficult to work with, especially after a public feud with one of the show’s stars, Chevy Chase.
But those who let him go failed to account for the singular personal vision that drove “Community,” which returns for a 13-episode fifth season, with Harmon back at the helm, Thursday at 8 p.m.
“Some shows can have a team of writers and a showrunner who divvies out assignments, and the show gets made that way. Other shows need one voice. This is one of those shows,” says Joel McHale, who plays disgraced lawyer Jeff Winger.
“It needed the voice of Dan Harmon, because the show is in his head. That’s where it lives. So last year just did not have the direction it had this year.”
Last season, run by David Guarascio and Moses Port, was marked by poor story decisions, such as the never-funny storyline where Ben Chang, played by Ken Jeong, pretended to have amnesia. Overall, the entire season had a bizarre body-snatcher quality to it, as if the characters had been replaced by replicants with similar quirks and vocal patterns, but without the parts of their personalities that made them funny.
Willa Paskin at Salon, noting Guarascio and Port’s “no-win” predicament, said that the show “reflected and refracted [Harmon’s] very singular, trippy, pop-culture-soaked worldview,” and that the new episodes “don’t really work at all” because they were “all idea, no laughter.”
Actors on a show often bristle at such sentiments, but in this case, the cast strongly agreed, to the point where McHale and Jim Rash, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter (“The Descendants”) who plays Dean Pelton, began strategizing about how to get Harmon back.
“I was in contact with Dan, and before I went down this path, I asked if he would be willing [to return], and he was,” says McHale. “That’s all I needed.” (Harmon was unavailable for an interview due to his working on new episodes.)
McHale and Rash held meetings with brass at NBC and Sony, which produces the show, and laid out the case for why Harmon should return.
Miraculously, the two companies acquiesced.
“Dan Harmon’s a genius,” says NBC executive vice president Vernon Sanders. “We are passionate about ‘Community,’ and we have always been passionate about ‘Community.’
“This was never a matter of us having such an ugly relationship with Dan that the possibility of him coming back was unappealing to us. There was a contingent of people involved in the day-to-day of the show that really missed having Dan’s voice there, and it was a collaborative decision [to bring Dan back].”
McHale says that the show felt like home again as soon as Harmon returned.
“Having him back has been a prayer answered. It’s like we’re breathing clean air again,” says McHale. “The show is the old show again, and you can see how well done it is and how good the writing is.”
But as soon as Harmon had the show back on solid ground, he faced another dilemma, as he learned that Donald Glover, who plays Troy, would be leaving the show midseason to focus on his music career. Glover releases hip-hop albums under the name Childish Gambino, and his new release, “Because the Internet,” is #7 in the country at press time.
McHale says that Harmon used Glover’s exit to brilliantly kick off a tender storyline for Abed, an emotionally walled-in character played by Danny Pudi who integrates his love for pop culture into his fragile sense of reality, and who is Troy’s best friend/hetero-soulmate.
“I think it’s the most interesting storyline of the year,” says McHale. “[Watching] Abed having to deal with someone he became emotionally attached to shows that Danny is one hell of an actor. He has to deal with this loss in his life, and that makes him more mature.”
Glover’s exit is not the show’s first, as Chase, who played older student Pierce Hawthorne and had previously feuded with Harmon, left in a blaze of negative comments about the show during season four. McHale says that Chase’s unhappiness became a problem.
“Chevy was not happy to be here, and that displeasure permeated the set,” says McHale, who still texts with Chase from time to time.
“He provided some great moments on the show, but his reputation is of one who is difficult to work with, and that, at times, was definitely the case. It’s hard keeping your energy up to deal with that.” But even without Chase and Glover, fans of “Community” will have much to be thankful for this season. Having seen three of the new episodes, we can report that this new season marks a clear return to the show’s best days. With Harmon back in charge, the cast hopes season five bodes well for a long TV life.
“I become emotional about this show because I love it so much,” says McHale. “When Dan came back, it was like this wonderful breath of fresh air, like having a family member return from being kidnapped in Colombia or something. Shows like this are very special and very rare, and I don’t know if I’ll ever work on something this high- quality again.”