It's no 'six seasons and a movie', but 'Community' fans will get to see Troy and Abed together again
‘Community’ fans have been for years chanting “six seasons and a movie” in the hopes that repeating it enough times would make it happen. And it seems to have worked. Kind of. Instead of “six seasons and a movie”, we can settle for “six seasons and a group video call”, can’t we?
According to a report in Variety, the cast of Dan Harmon’s genre-bending comedy series ‘Community’, along with Harmon will reunite for a virtual table read and question and answers session. Yes. Jeff Winger (Joel McHale), Britta Perry (Gillian Jacobs), Troy Barnes (Donald Glover) Abed Nadir (Danny Pudi), Shirley Bennett (Yvette Nicole Brown), Annie Edison (Alison Brie), Dean Pelton (Jim Rash), Ben Chang (Ken Jeong) are all set to join the table read, along with Harmon.
This will be the first time that Troy and Abed will be together since Glover’s departure from the show in season 5. Can you hear a chorus of “Troy and Abed in the morning” inside your head? In fact, the episode they will be reading, ‘Cooperative Polygraphy’, is the penultimate episode where Glover appeared. It also makes sense that the episode -- Season 5 Episode 4 first aired January 16, 2014, on NBC -- they will be reading is one where they come back from Pierce Hawthorne’s (Chevy Chase) funeral. Pierce’s estate executor, played by Walton Goggins, sadly will not be able to participate in the reading.
Chase had left the show in 2012 and it wasn’t on good terms. Glover and Harmon recalled in a New Yorker interview how Chase, jealous of Glover’s talent, would throw racist barbs at him constantly. He said things like, “People think you’re funnier because you’re black,” to Glover, who remained unaffected by it.
Harmon recalled, “Chevy was the first to realize how immensely gifted Donald was, and the way he expressed his jealousy was to try to throw Donald off. I remember apologizing to Donald after a particularly rough night of Chevy’s non-P.C. verbiage, and Donald said, ‘I don’t even worry about it’.”
Coming back to the table read, the event will be shown in its entirety, along with a Q&A of fan questions, on Monday, May 18, at 2 pm PST on Sony Pictures TV’s ‘Community’ YouTube page. Fans can submit their questions on Twitter using #AskCommunity and tag @CommunityTV.
But this event is not just a nostalgia trip. It’s also for Covid-19 relief. As part of the event, fans will be asked to contribute to two charities: José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen and Frontline Foods, both of which are involved in relief efforts. Reportedly, Sony Pictures Television will also contribute to the charities on behalf of the ‘Community’ family.
Fans of ‘Community’ will remember ‘Cooperative Polygraphy’ as one of the show’s more sentimental ones. Despite being what Abed would call a bottle episode, in the course of answering a polygraph test to determine if any of the study group had killed Pierce, they all realize that the crazy, racist, rich old man did indeed care for them.
‘Community’ ran for six seasons on NBC and later on Yahoo Screen. With 110 episodes, fans have, since it ended in 2015, pinned their hopes on the show’s promise and Abed’s prophecy of “six seasons and a movie”. The finale even had “#AndAMovie” written in the end. This may not be it, but for the time being, we can consider it the next best thing. In the words of Abed Nadir, "Cool. Cool cool cool."