The End Of Community? And 8 Sentences About Another Period

The End of Community

-Joel McHale told an interviewer that a seventh season of Community won’t happen. Cast contracts ended after season six, and no one’s affordable anymore. Yahoo didn’t confirm McHale’s comment about the future of the series. Dan Harmon hasn’t said very much about the future of the story, besides that cast contracts ended, some have new series, and he’d like to a movie. McHale said Harmon needed to write a script before anyone got excited about a movie (that’s a rough paraphrase). Speculation around the entertainment websites and blogosphere involves a seventh Community season following in the hallowed path of Scrubs: Med School, the quasi-spinoff that cast James Franco’s younger brother and the delightful Eliza Couple. Folk think Joel McHale and Jim Rash would continue as cast members guiding a new generation of Greendale miscreants and sociopaths.

Joel McHale’s a great diplomatist. The man got Harmon his job after season four. Money’s part of the reason everyone but McHale and Rash would not return, but the desire to do new projects and move beyond the aging TV series is another part. Community had five good seasons. The series changed a little after Chevy Chase and Donald Glover left the series. The series changed more after Shirley’s departure followed by the introduction of Frankie and Elroy. Frankie and Elroy fit into a different kind of group dynamic, but the writers wrote episodes toward the habits, personalities of the original group. The greatest instance of change and disparity between the first three seasons and season six is the road trip episode with the giant hand on top of the RV, or the obnoxious group behavior at the wedding (maybe that’s what being part of the group does to a person, though; it turns a person into a sociopathic miscreant).

I’d watch a season seven. I long ago stopped clinging to past versions of a show. TV shows evolve, change, devolve, and regress. Creativity has long sustained outstanding bursts of storytelling, but it ebbs and flows. Who knows how long a person gets at his or her creative peak? Nabokov thought Nikolai Gogol only had 12 years of creative genius. William Shakespeare experienced a historically creative period (1598-1610). Shakespeare wrote King Lear and immediately after wrote Macbeth. Harmon’s creative imagination and energy may enjoy a new burst if Community continues. He may’ve exhausted the story or the story may’ve exhausted him or the story exhausted itself. His other series, Rick and Morty, which he co-created with Justin Roiland (a man who knows great nonsense) is frenetic, crazy, insanely imaginative, and like the early seasons of Community. Everything Roiland, Harmon, Ridley, and the other writers put into the final draft, the final cut of the episode, is working and soaring.

For Community, I’m in as long as Harmon’s in. Also, McHale expected "nothing less than 900 episodes."

-Another Period, the Comedy Central series created by Natasha Leggero and Riki Lindholme, has much great nonsense, which is the highest praise TV With The Foot can give a series. I love Chair, Garfield, Hamish, Beatrice, Lillian, Dodo, and Peepers. Last night’s episode featured role-reversals. Peepers play-acted the Commodore; Blanche put on a dress and became Beatrice’s best friend, and Lillian became Hamish’s lover. For anyone unfamiliar, the show is a reality series set at the turn of century with an aristocratic family at the center. Freud, Charles Ponzi, Mark Twain, Gandhi, Trotsky appeared in various episodes. The writers play with and subvert tropes, and the writing’s more parodic than satire--for parody’s a game and satire’s a lesson. Parody’s more fun.