As reports dribble out about the “and a movie” part of the “six seasons and a movie” rallying cry by the fans, cast and creator of Community, the opportunities to watch Dan Harmon’s weird and hilarious 2009-15 series were limited to subscribers of Peacock, unless you wanted ads or to pay extra. Now the entire six seasons — yes, including the Harmon-free 4th season and the 6th season that ran on Yahoo Screen — have landed at Hulu.
Opening Shot: Chimes ring at Greendale Community College. Dean Pelton (Jim Rash) tries to turn it off but plays a rap song instead. Then he gives a first-week greeting to new students.
The Gist: One of those new students is Jeff Winger (Joel McHale), who we first see getting his ear talked off by fellow student Abed Nadir (Danny Pudi). “Nice to know you and then meet you, in that order,” Jeff dryly says to Abed. Then he spies an attractive student name Britta Perry (Gillian Jacobs) and wants to know what her deal is.
After Abed gives Jeff the rapid lowdown, Jeff goes to see his friend, Professor Ian Duncan (John Oliver). Jeff is Duncan’s lawyer, but can’t practice because the bar association found out that some of his college credits were illegitimate. This is why he’s at Greendale, and he wants Duncan to help him pass by giving him all of the answers to all of the tests. Duncan only agrees if they can trade cars.
When Jeff sees Britta studying Spanish in the cafeteria, he suggests that they do a study group together; he lies to her and says he’s a “certified” Spanish instructor. Britta, who’s seen guys like Jeff hit on her for years, is wary, and Jeff is shocked when he walks into the library study room and sees not only Britta but Abed, former high school football star Troy Barnes (Donald Glover), young do-gooder Annie Edison (Alison Brie), “middle-aged housewife” Shirley Bennett (Yvette Nicole Brown) and wealthy wipes empire scion Pierce Hawthorne (Chevy Chase).
Jeff charms people for a living, so it’s not hard to get everyone in the group except Britta on his side, even though he obviously shows he knows little about Spanish. “I discovered at a very early age that if I talk long enough, I could make anything right or wrong,” he tells Duncan.
Everyone reveals their foibles in the second group meeting: Troy is picking up the pieces after his football career went south due to an ill-timed keg stand; Annie puts so much pressure on herself she was called “Little Annie Adderall” in school; Britta is way too eager to tell people about her “causes”; Abed can conflate pop culture with reality; Shirley is sweet but can have moments of rage; and Pierce is old-fashioned, bigoted, and really looking for a connection. Jeff uses these foibles to his advantage to make the group argue instead of study, just so he can get Britta alone.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Community is a “found family” hangout comedy in the vein of Parks And Recreation, which premiered on NBC a few months before Community did in 2009. But, thanks to creator Dan Harmon — who would go on to scale even bigger heights with his decade-defining animated smash Rick & Morty — Community soon got way weirder and way more creative with the genre than anything that came before it.
Our Take: After being fans of Community and covering the show heavily during most of its NBC run — the final season, which streamed on the now-defunct Yahoo Screen, is something we have wanted to catch up to for a decade — we were curious to see how well its first couple of episodes held up. Besides the fact that the pilot was from (gulp!) 16 years ago and everyone in it might look far younger than they do now, we were wondering if the pilot had any of that manic weirdness that Harmon would infuse in the show as it went along.
The pilot indeed holds up — except for one line, which we’ll explain later — but it’s one of the most straightforward Harmon-run episodes the show ever had. Harmon needed to go through a lot of exposition with a primary cast of 7 people, and he does so with efficiency, using the study room as the conduit for everyone to air their grievances. That room continued to be the show’s centerpiece, mainly because it was one of the few places where everyone could be and cross-talk with each other.
Despite how much smarm McHale brings to Jeff in the initial episodes, there’s still that whiff of humanity there, especially as Britta calls him out for being so manipulative. In the second episode, for instance, he realizes that Pierce just wants to hang out with him and ends up doing a crazy Spanish presentation with him (set to the tune of Aimee Mann’s “Wise Up”), which Professor Ben Chang (Ken Jeong) gives an “F and F-minus.”
What Harmon was and is so good at is layering in character traits, using dialogue, expressions and actions. Jeff, for instance, talks like the sleazy lawyer he used to be, but underneath it all he starts to appreciate the group almost from the start. Pierce is a racist but mostly sad. Troy and Abed form an unlikely bond via things like rapping bad Spanish. Annie has a tough interior under her brittle exterior. Britta is more sensitive than she lets on. And Shirley can just say something as an aside, like a lilting “that’s funny”, and we see who she is when she does that.
The fact that Harmon was able to reveal so much about his main cast in the first episode, and that’s before we got to hear from side characters like Dean Pelton, Star-Burns (Dino Stamatopoulos), Leonard (Richard Erdman) and others, really allowed him to take them to some strange and often hilarious places, especially in the first four seasons.
Sex and Skin: None. It’s a network sitcom.
Parting Shot: The group convinces Jeff, who doesn’t know much Spanish, to come back into the library and study with them.
Sleeper Star: Even though Jeong made an immediate impact as Chang, we wish the show was able to utilize Oliver more. He was likely only available to them when he wasn’t doing The Daily Show, then left the show altogether a couple of years before getting his own show, Last Week Tonight. But he’s funny as hell as Duncan, and Duncan’s semi-disgusted rapport with Jeff is a highlight of the pilot.
Most Pilot-y Line: After Britta exposes Jeff, Abed says that he’s more like Michael Douglas than Bill Murray, to which Jeff shoots back, “Well, you have Asperger’s.” Troy and Pierce then make fun of the name by saying “Ass Burger.” For a lot of reasons, that line has not aged well in the subsequent 16 years.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Community‘s pilot episode may not have been nearly as weird as the rest of the series, but it sets the characters up nicely and has enough funny moments to show that Dan Harmon and his writers had a good sense of what the show was about from day one, which isn’t something we can say about even the best sitcoms in TV history.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.