Who’s Streaming Now

With its first season on Yahoo Screen (and sixth overall) now sealed like a college transcript, the comeback power of Community — and the optimism of its fans — has once again been affirmed.

Over the course of five seasons on NBC, fans stuck with the comedy through the critical loss of creator–showrunner Dan Harmon in season four and his subsequent rehiring the following year. Then there was the near-move to Hulu, and then the actual move Yahoo, courtesy of the winning pitch made by Kathy Savitt, the web giant’s chief marketing officer. Season six debuted on Yahoo in March; the finale aired June 2.

With all those ups and downs, it seems only appropriate that the show was hatched from Harmon’s self-professed negativity. As a community college student in his 30s, he balked at joining a study group in the school library.

“It all kind of flooded into me,” Harmon recalls, “the irony that I had enrolled in a community college but didn’t want to talk to the people that wanted to study with me, and wanted to be a community with me.” He filed the experience away “for the next time I was in a mainstream pitch meeting” in his subsequent television career.

In creating the characters of Community, he drew heavily from his own life, combing through his contact list and stopping at the names that gave him an “emotional jolt.”

The result included the likes of Britta (Gillian Jacobs), “an amalgam of all the women I’ve ever loved — all of the bad women I’ve ever loved, at any rate — anybody who ever played an instrument or smoked a cigarette. And Annie [Alison Brie],” he adds, “was every girl I ever really had a crush on or who didn’t like me because I was dirty.”

Abed (Danny Pudi) was based on a friend of the same name, “somebody who has one foot in and one foot out.” And study group leader Jeff Winger (Joel McHale) was based on “partially my best friend Jeff and partially on all the parts of me that want to succeed and be liked, and measure that success by material components.”

Joel McHale, the cast lead, lobbied strongly for Harmon’s return. “There are only a few shows on television that can only be written by one person and come out of their brain,” McHale says, citing South Park, Breaking Bad and Mad Men as other examples. “That was very evident when Dan was gone for season four.”

The love is not lost on Harmon, who remains grateful for McHale’s loyalty. “Every once in a while, after a rehearsal, I'll quietly thank Joel for my job, and he'll say, ‘Thank you for the show.’ And we'll just get back to work. I sit up here in my office and try to serve him with the best writing I can give him.”

Much has been made of the pitch that Savitt made during a set visit in January to the cast and crew to bring them to the streaming service.

“She was speaking about the show in a way that I had never heard before,” Harmon remembers. “That’s what made me say, ‘I’m on the wrong side of history if I don’t do a deal with this person.’”

McHale was similarly impressed. “We never had anything like that. And we were always put at a rough time slot — as Dan called it, ‘the Vietnam of time slots.’”

Savitt, by contrast, was very thorough, McHale relates: “She laid out what the marketing plan was. And we all sat there staring at her quietly as she finished. And she looked at us and I think for a moment she thought that we might be mad, because she laid out this very elaborate, like, “Here’s the rollout, here’s the money we’re spending, here’s what we’re doing, we have this photo campaign…” and we just stared at her. Then she looked back at us and went like, “It’s okay, right?”

It was more than okay.

As for the move from a broadcast network to the “loosened corset” (Harmon’s words) of an online platform, the main difference noted by all is episode length: from the previous 22 minutes to the new average of 27.

“Sometimes it’s a two or three minute difference,” Savitt notes, “but it’s allowing us to flesh out some of these creative ideas.”

The transition to the internet doesn’t mean a more risqué program, however. “It’s not just mixed martial arts and strippers,” McHale quips.

Cast members Donald Glover, Chevy Chase and Yvette Nicole Brown have left the show, but new additions Keith David and Paget Brewster have reportedly fit in seamlessly, both on screen and off.

Of the losses and subsequent gains, McHale says, “It’s just like losing a friend in your life and it sucks. But then when you get someone like Keith and Paget, they’re tremendous. They help to breathe a whole wonderful different life into the show.”

Savitt adds: “Not only have Keith and Paget not missed a beat, but they have integrated and become favorites on the show almost immediately.”

Once a prediction made by Abed about superhero show The Cape, the hashtag #sixseasonsandamovie is now the mantra of Community fans, who seem to shown up online, too — though Yahoo, like other streaming services, does not release ratings data.

“There are so many parts to the Community experience that have been remarkable,” Savitt says, “but one of the most impressive to me has been the fan support and appreciation.” Those fans, she says, have sent messages and posted tweets with ideas for the show’s marketing, and even shared stories of how they urge others to use Yahoo for email and web searches. 

As far as the future of Community is concerned, Harmon says, “I’m sort of compelled to do it. It feels like it has its own life, I would betray it by walking away. I would also feel completely lost. The best I can do is to put those feelings into Jeff Winger and his situation and hope that it can work itself out on screen.”

Yahoo Screen, that is.