Community Movie Should Be Driven By Fan Service, Says Alison Brie

Annie actor Alison Brie details what she hopes to see from the long-awaited Community movie, expressing that fan service should be a top priority. First premiering in 2009 on NBC, Community quickly developed a passionate following thanks to the hilarious exploits of a misfit group of students at Greendale Community College. The show aired for five seasons on NBC before moving to Yahoo! Screen for its sixth and final season in 2015, with talk of a movie persisting ever since.

Joel McHale, who plays leading man Jeff Winger in the show, has previously expressed willingness to return for a Community movie, and creator Dan Harmon recently provided a very promising update on the project’s potential earlier this summer. Brie, similarly, seems game to return, and it’s widely assumed that Danny Pudi’s Abed, Gillian Jacobs’ Britta, and Yvette Nicole Brown’s Shirley would also feature in the long-awaited movie. While most of the core cast members may be on board, Chevy Chase’s Pierce is unlikely to make an appearance in a Community movie considering his character died after the events of season 4, though he did appear as a hologram in season 5. It’s also unclear if Donald Glover would return as Troy after the actor’s exit from the show about halfway through season 5.

In a new interview with The Daily Beast on The Last Laugh podcast, Brie talks about what she wants to see from the potential Community movie, saying it should feature fan service and go back to the show’s Greendale roots. Later on, she expresses her hope the production could get Glover back as Troy, even if it’s just for a cameo. Check out Brie’s comments below:

I’m sort of like, let’s do fan service. Don’t try something that’s so crazy. Let’s get us back to Greendale. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel.

He [Glover]’s a busy guy. Yeah, I mean, I hope so. I would love that. And I also feel like everyone would be so amenable to whatever we had to do. Like, let’s carve out a single day, green screen, could we send someone to wherever Donald is in the world and just get a shot of his face saying something?

After three successful and beloved seasons, Community took a noticeable dip in quality with season 4 after Harmon was fired. The fourth season was widely criticized for its poor writing, with many storylines straying too far from what had made the show so beloved in the first place. Harmon would end up returning for seasons 5 and 6, both of which earned more favorable reviews but still took the show in some new directions. With the years-long gap between the events of season 6 and a movie, it’s unclear what events might bring Winger, Annie, Abed, Shirley, and Britta back to Greendale, with most of the characters having graduated by the show’s end.

While many questions remain about how a Community movie would work, Glover’s Troy was a popular character in the show, and many viewers would surely be happy to see him return, playing into the fan service Brie suggests. Glover not only has a successful music career now but also created FX’s Atlanta, so, as Brie points out, a quick cameo may be the only way Troy could make an appearance in any Community movie. It remains to be seen whether the film will ever come to fruition, but Harmon and the actors involved seem more confident that it will happen than ever before, meaning it might just be a matter of time before the Greendale gang gets back together.

Source: The Daily Beast