Finally!

It’s taken a day to process the fact that it’s actually happening. Peacock greenlit the untitled Community movie, reportedly after a bidding war with series creator Dan Harmon. What was once only a hashtag is now a reality. And I can’t wait.

Peacock seems pretty happy too, which is good news, considering that NBC, the first home of the irreverent sitcom, cancelled the show after five seasons, which made the sixth season hard to find on the now-defunct Yahoo Screen service.

“‘Six seasons and a movie’ started out as a cheeky line from ‘Community’s early seasons and quickly ignited a passionate fan movement for this iconic, hilarious and cool (cool, cool) NBC comedy,” said Susan Rovner, chairman, entertainment content, NBCUniversal Television and Streaming. “We’re incredibly grateful that 15 years later, we are able to deliver fans this promised movie and can’t wait to get to work with Dan Harmon, Andrew Guest, Joel McHale, Sony and our partners at UTV to continue this epic comedy for Peacock audiences.” 

Harmon, who admittedly could be unprofessional on set and who was dismissed from the series during its fourth season, will write the script alongside Guest, who penned five episodes of Community during its first two seasons.

At least six of Community’s nine core stars are returning for the movie: Joel McHale (Jeff), Danny Pudi (Abed), Alison Brie (Annie), Gillian Jacobs (Britta), Jim Rash (Craig) and Ken Jeong (Ben) are all definitely attached. The three others, who all departed the show before its final episode, may or may not be in negotiations to return in some capacity.

Fans like me hope that at least two of them will; the movie won’t be as satisfying without Donald Glover (Troy) or Yvette Nicole Brown (Shirley), who were on the show for most of its run. (Chevy Chase, who played Pierce and clashed with Harmon and others on set, feels less necessary, especially since his character died after four seasons.)

Glover appeared in only a handful of early season five episodes and did not return for the eventual series finale, and is currently killing it as the Emmy-winning creator, writer and star of FX’s Atlanta, as well as in his musical career as Childish Gambino. Brown, meanwhile, left after season five in order to care for her father. She did return for the series ender, either, and the absence of both was keenly felt.

Other actors who played substantial roles on the show, especially in the last two seasons, include John Oliver, Jonathan Banks, Paget Brewster and Keith David, and there’s no word on whether any of them may be involved in the project.

Even so, this is the best possible news for fans of the show like me. From the very beginning, Community was something very special: an untraditional sitcom, without a studio audience or laugh track, Harmon and the show’s many talented writers trusted that the audience would get their jokes. The show, while grounded in a semi-reality where a small group of Community College students formed a clique that bonded them together for six years of studying, often veered off into an absurdly hilarious unreality where a paintball tournament could render the entire college a barren wasteland not once, but twice.

This is a show that took three episodes over three seasons to make a Beetlejuice joke, and then put it in the background of the scene, calling no attention to it whatsoever. There were jokes in the posters on the wall. There were meta-episodes where characters flashed back to episodes we never saw. The show expertly lampooned the sitcom tropes without ever falling into the trap of mindlessly repeating them.

As an adolescent, I discovered Monty Python’s Flying Circus. I was upstairs in my room when I heard my father downstairs laughing at something. When I went down to investigate, I discovered him watching the “Upperclass Twit of the Year” sketch on the show, which played late Sunday nights on the Chicago PBS station that reached my home in Indiana. I sat down to watch the rest of the show and was hooked…not just on Monty Python but on absurdist humor.

I looked for shows that went deeper than standard sitcom jokiness; where the unexpected could be expected to happen. Over the years, I’ve loved comedies like Looney Tunes cartoons, Blackadder, SCTV, Kids in the Hall, Andy Richter Controls the Universe, South Park, Better Off Ted, and movies from directors like Terry Gilliam, the Coen brothers and Wes Anderson because they are unpredictable. The best humor surprises its audience.

I was predisposed to like Community because its star, Joel McHale hosted The Soup, an E! Network show that made fun of clips from talk shows. (Shows that make fun of bad TV and movies is my second-favorite genre, with Mystery Science Theater 3000 ranking among my most favorite shows ever as well.)

So while the show took a couple episodes to ramp up to the brilliant and hilarious comedy it would become, I was ready to stick it out. And I was rewarded with the most inventive and addictive sitcom I’d ever seen. The show mastered the concept episode: an episode that expertly parodied (or lauded) another genre of storytelling.

The “Chicken Fingers” episode was the sitcom version of Goodfellas. There were episodes that were pitch-perfect homages to Law and Order, to My Dinner with Andre, and to stop-motion Christmas classics like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

In its first (and admittedly best) three seasons, the show’s chief directors were Joe and Anthony Russo, whose names you recognize because they directed two Captain America movies and two Avengers movies (and who repeatedly cast Community alums in their films). Their ability to so expertly recreate big-budget movies on a network TV budget is what landed them the Marvel gig.

There’s not enough space to describe the best episodes of what surely still is my favorite show…the bottle episode, the blanket fort episode, the Dungeons and Dragons episode, the LeVar Burton episode, the third paintball episode, the Zombie Halloween episode, the Darkest Timeline episode…there are just so many perfect episodes that I could watch again and again. Do yourself a huge favor and give them a shot. They’re all on Netflix.

But there was something else this show had that went beyond meticulously crafted humor: the show had heart. They were all good, but flawed, people, who came together to make each other better. The actors too genuinely liked, even loved each other, and that was evident on and even off set. A pandemic-era special, which saw all cast members except Chase get together remotely to read through a script from one episode, showed that they still are a family, even though most of them have not worked together since the show ended in 2015.

So it’s not just the fulfillment of the show’s “Six Seasons and a Movie” prophecy that I am so excited about. I can’t wait to spend more time with these people I love. Community was not perfect; the last three seasons were hit and miss, but I still love it. No show in my recent memory has delighted and engaged me the way this one has. The show wasn’t for everyone (its ratings paled against its constant competitor The Big Bang Theory), but Community was most certainly made for me.