(By Michael
Schneider, TVGuide.com, Dec 24, 2013)
NBC couldn't kill Community, even
if it tried — and it definitely tried. But lengthy hiatuses and unusual
scheduling (including Thanksgiving and Christmas episodes airing last spring)
wouldn't destroy it. A controversial decision to replace creator Dan
Harmon as showrunner last season couldn't slay it. Even all that Twitter
chatter about "six seasons and a movie" didn't jinx it."Community
is like a Twinkie," says Yvette
Nicole Brown, who plays Shirley, perhaps the sweetest of the
community-college study-group members who form the show's heart. "The
shelf life of this show has defied odds."
The comedy doesn't get big ratings or tons of awards: A
banner outside Stage 31 on the Paramount Studios lot in Hollywood, where it's
filmed, reads, "congratulations — 0 emmy nominations!" But Community
boasts plenty of critical acclaim and one of the most fervent fan bases in
television. Not only is that loyal
audience part of the reason the show is back on Jan. 2 for a surprise fifth
season, but it's also why — in an unprecedented move — Harmon was brought back
to run the show (with fellow executive producer Chris
McKenna, also returning from exile).
"A lot of us did not expect to get a fifth season," says Alison Brie,
who plays innocent Annie. "By now we're so used to having the rug pulled
up from under us."
Joel McHale,
who stars as disgraced lawyer Jeff Winger, was instrumental in lobbying NBC and
Sony (which produces Community) to bring back Harmon. "The show was
in Dan's head," McHale says. "I think it can really only come from
him." The studio and network, which
had clashed with Harmon over budgetary and creative issues, dropped him from
the show in May 2012 while ordering a fourth season. "Nobody has had a
conversation about what happened," Harmon says, "or why it
unhappened." He was replaced by Moses Port and David
Guarascio (Just Shoot Me), who were apparently brought on to make Community
more accessible. The duo had to be convinced to take the job, knowing it
was a thankless endeavor. Many critics, who initially worried that the two
might take the edge off Community, later took them to task for trying to
emulate Harmon's voice. "There was
a whiteboard in the writers' room that had about 10 ideas we never got around
to because they posed too difficult a creative challenge," Harmon says.
"I was blown away to see [my replacements] were going down that list:
doing an Inspector Spacetime convention; having Winger reconcile with
his dad; the Pierce haunted house. It was a creative agenda I thought was the
reason I got fired."
When Harmon was finally asked back, he felt he had no choice
but to return. "If I did go back, the worst thing that could happen is a
bad season of television," he says. "If I didn't go back, the worst
thing that could happen is a lifetime of questions. I would have been
miserable." But in returning to Community,
Harmon had to "not let the studio, network and the outside world get to
me. I let it drive me crazy, and I let it inhibit the quality of my work,"
he says. "I knew coming into Season 5 that we were already off the
schedule, and I had to wake up every morning at peace with the idea that no one
might ever see what we were doing. It had to be about the craftsmanship. It had
to be about making 13 episodes of television that I would love."
Although he's critical of how Port and Guarascio handled the
show, Harmon admits he's grateful they didn't dramatically change the show's
mythology, making it relatively easy to regroup from the two biggest changes at
the end of Season 4: Winger graduating, which was in line with Harmon's plan,
and haughty millionaire Pierce (Chevy Chase)
leaving, a function of the actor wanting out.
Chase expressed much displeasure in the media about Community and
the direction of his character. "You've read the 300 or 400
articles," McHale says. "The articles say he didn't like the writing
and didn't like the show and didn't watch it and didn't want to be here. And
now he's not."
In the season premiere (airing Thursday, Jan. 2 at 8/7c),
it's months later, and the members of the group have moved on with their lives
outside Greendale Community College. But when Winger comes up with a scheme to
reunite the gang, they're willing to play along — despite Jeff's questionable
motives. Making a subtle reference to Season 4, the characters joke of a
"yearlong gas leak" that made them all act a bit differently. With a clean slate, Harmon says he, McKenna
and the writers decided to write an opener that fulfills the same function as a
brand-new pilot. The episode, titled "Repilot," even contains
callbacks to Community's first episode. "We needed to get back to
basics," Harmon says, "and we needed to tell a satisfying story about
someone coming back to community college, having not been in it."
McHale approves of the new direction. "It's all really
rich and great," he says. "The scripts are so good. No matter what
happens with the episodes, I know we're making good TV." His character
eventually takes a job teaching at the school, which Harmon admits he had said
Jeff would never do. "[It] seems like a jump-the-shark [moment]," he
says, "so we needed to give him a reason to do it that resonated and
allowed people to respect Jeff." Danny Pudi, who
plays socially awkward Abed, says the show has been energized: "It's been
nice to go back to some of the things that we were exploring when the show
began." Says Gillian Jacobs,
who plays the flighty Britta, "We're still ambitious, we're still going
for broke, but the heart of the show is really there, and the characters feel
grounded."
Harmon has stressed the importance of spending more time on
character development, which is why the first few episodes of Season 5 are not
larger than life, like Community's famous paintball installments. And
some ideas — like Abed's favorite TV show, Inspector Spacetime — were so
overused last year that Harmon decided to retire them. "I came into Season 5 gun-shy,"
Harmon says. "My mantra every morning was, 'Keep your feet on the ground
and make sure each episode is understandable.'" The much larger- and more painful- issue
Harmon and McKenna faced was figuring out how to deal with the exit of Donald Glover,
who plays Abed's best friend, Troy. The actor decided to depart at midseason to
focus on other projects, including his hip-hop alter ego, Childish Gambino. "I just watched the episode where Troy
leaves, and it's heartbreaking," Harmon says. "It's a real
Kleenex-boxer. I wrote it, I was there when they shot it, I'm editing it and
I'm not even looking at a completed version, and my eyes were running like a
faucet."
http://www.tvguide.com/News/Inside-Community-Return-1074978.aspx?et=watchlist-notification<=news
Dan
Harmon Reveals How Community Pulled Off This Week's Surprise Cameo
(By Michael
Schneider, TV Guide, Jan 3, 2014)
The return
of Community
executive producer Dan Harmon to
the series he created — and
then was fired from — was a shock enough. But fans of the show were in for
another surprise Thursday night, as another exiled Community member made
a brief return: Former co-star Chevy Chase. In the Season 5 premiere, Chase's
cantankerous Pierce Hawthorne shows up as a hologram in order to talk some
sense into Jeff Winger (Joel McHale),
who has tricked his pals into helping him take down Greendale Community
College. The run-in with Pierce triggers a change of heart in Winger, who
ultimately decides to help save Greendale from within as a new professor. Chase famously departed
Community at the end of Season 4 after expressing his unhappiness with
the show, having once even called his participation a "big mistake."
But Chase has also discussed his fondness of the show's cast, and although he
and Harmon have had well-publicized run-ins, both the actor and producer have
also said reports of a feud have been overblown.
Harmon tells TV Guide Magazine that he wanted to
bring Chase back in a cameo, but that Chase's exit agreement with Sony Pictures
Television, which produces Community, prevented the actor from actually
setting foot on stage. That's why Harmon came up with the idea of bringing
Pierce back as a hologram. "It was
a question of, how do you include somebody that people want to see again that
has actually been contractually bound not to be on set?" Harmon says.
"We definitely needed something to turn Jeff as he was walking away with
the power to end Greendale and end everything in his hand. It seemed
appropriate that this would be a moment that Pierce, when he was still on the
show, would have been a help. It was certainly the role he fulfilled in the
original pilot. He was the first turning point in Jeff becoming a part of that
family."
Harmon says he became determined to bring back Pierce in
order to block Jeff's path. "I started with that image in my head of a
blue Obi-Wan ghost of Chevy Chase. Why would that happen? How is that possible?
And then you realize that Pierce is a millionaire and he has a history with the
campus. So we thought, 'Maybe this is a way around this contract thing, the
terms of his departure with the studio. Maybe we can get around that by
shooting him separately in a goliath stage with Chevy-proof walls." Sony gave its blessing, and Community
shot Chase on a different stage with a motion control camera.
Asked if things were cool between him and Chase, Harmon
calls the comedian "hilarious and one of a kind and a consummate soloist.
He's somebody who, like me, doesn't deal well with people telling him what to
do. Nobody appreciated that more than me and nobody had to deal with that more
than me." Harmon points out that he
has worked with Chase longer than any TV other producer has worked with the Saturday
Night Live alum. "We were very similar. And we still joke around on
the phone with each other. People see in interviews him saying bad stuff about
the show, but I just laugh and he always laughs."
News of a feud really took off after Harmon played some of
Chase's angry voice mail messages at a comedy show. But Harmon says Chase
"laughed during the whole voice mail thing. The part of the nice thing
about these personalities and his part and my part is they come with relatively
thick, resilient skin. "He left
that voice mail in a passionate mode and I played it for people in a passionate
mode. The bigger picture is two guys who really, desperately know that they are
nothing without people laughing at them. [We] really respect and appreciate
each other for that fact." The
question remains, why was there wording in Chevy's exit that barred him from
returning to the Community stage? Is that unusual that he can't even
return to visit? "You'd have to talk to lawyers about that, I don't
know," Harmon says. "That's what I was told, that it was a legal
thing, it's a contract thing. I wasn't here when he left, so I don't know how
that works. Talk to the suits, they love doing interviews, right?"
No comments:
Post a Comment