Joel McHale “expects nothing short of 900 episodes” for his new sitcom “Community.””After reading Dan’s script it was so head and shoulders above everything else that I was reading. And it was just incredibly funny and it had really strong characters and a lot of heart,” McHale said.
McHale, the star of E!’s popular program “The Soup,” portrays a fast-talking lawyer named Jeff Winger who, after his law degree has been found out to be less than authentic, enrolls in Greendale Community College. Jeff’s a guy with lot of smarts and little heart.
The pitch for the show came from creator Dan Harmon’s own experience at Glendale Community College while in his early 30s.
“I was in a study group with a bunch of strangers at a community college to whom I actually took a kind of — I acquired a natural affinity in spite of my desire to keep them at arm’s length because I was kind of a jerk, you know, just a tourist at a community college, just screwing around and these people really wanted to study with me,” Harmon said.
“And there was a spark there that doesn’t exist with people — you know, most of us are friends with people we know from work basically, people that are colleagues and that are above or below us on some kind of ladder we can understand. And we very rarely are forced into these quote/unquote “community situations” like a driver’s ed class or, you know you’re at a — the only times we do it are at 7-11s and things where — and strange things happen there.”
Harmon’s feelings in community college are given to Jeff. He thinks he has nothing to learn at a place like a community college, a place where the perception is that only old people, middle-aged divorcees, and losers attend.
During the middle of the first week, he tries to get the answers for every test he’ll take during the semester from a former client (John Oliver) and Jeff makes up a Spanish study group in order to hook up with Britta (Gillian Jacobs), a 28 year-old high school drop-out who is looking to find herself.
The plan doesn’t go as intended when a fellow classmate named Abed (Danny Pudi) shows up as well as a variety of different characters.
They include Pierce (Chevy Chase), an older gentleman who has acquired quite amount of wisdom about life, a middle-aged divorcee with spunk (Yvette Nicole Brown), a high-strung perfectionist in Annie(Alison Brie), and Troy (Donald Glover), a former high school quarterback and prom king.
Problems ensue when Jeff intentionally upsets each person in his new “study group” in an attempt to be alone with Britta. In doing so, he reveals his dastardly ways to her. But, by the end of the episode, he begins the process of redeeming himself after he realizes his fast-talking ways won’t get him to where he wants to be in life.
He realizes he can’t simply say ‘booyah!’ to moral relativism and be done with it. His new study group offers him a second chance to learn with them.
For McHale, his first love has always been acting. It’s the reason he moved to L.A.
“I took “The Soup” job because I wanted hopefully to do what it did for Greg Kinnear or at least do a little bit of what it did for Greg Kinnear and get me into the rooms with people like Dan so I can show them that I can do it. And thankfully that part has worked out. Let’s hope people watch the show,” McHale said.
As the wise-cracking Jeff Winger, McHale knows what he wants to do with the character.
“My main goal is to make sure that I bring this character to life and do it well and hopefully make it look like I’m telling the story and serving the writing and serving the character.
That’s what I always am trying to figure out. ‘Where am I coming from?’ ‘Where am I going?’ And what is my guy thinking?’ And those are the biggest challenges that I encounter and whether I can get a decent cup of coffee on set,” McHale said.
For Dan Harmon, he wanted to created a sitcom that his mother would enjoy. He wanted to create characters that were relatable, that felt authentic, and characters that came from all sorts of backround.
“I did that by keeping the script quote-unquote, race neutral, to use a casting term. But drawing very, very specific lines about how old these people were. And in my head, keeping it sort of a secret in regards to what their backgrounds were, whether they were born rich or poor, whether they were raised by one parent that loved them too much, or two parents that didn’t love them enough. And things like that,” Harmon said.
But most of all, he wants “Community” to “remind you of television from a golden age when TV was really kind of proud of itself.”
And that’s what he hopes people get out of it.
The show will air on Thursdays at 9:30 until Oct. 8 when it moves to its new time 8 p.m. on NBC.
Chris Monigle is a fifth-year student majoring in Literature. He can be reached at CM660983@wcupa.edu.