The show with nine lives has an airdate for its latest season: Thirteen new episodes of the cult favorite “Community” are coming to Yahoo beginning March 17. No word yet on whether this development portends the necessity of yet another streaming stick gadget to watch it on a nonsmart TV set.
The sixth season is happening with the blessing of creator and executive producer Dan Harmon. Harmon has a uniquely strong connection with the show’s rabid, if comparatively tiny, fandom, which is part of why the show seemed destined for a second life on the Internet when NBC canceled it last year.
But as many times as “Community” has been on the chopping block for meager ratings, Harmon said he would just keep writing the show as long as there’s an audience.
“I’m very naive about how the business actually works: these guys’ contracts, schedules and all those things,” Harmon said via the New York Daily News, “so I just stick with a very sixth-grade mentality, which is that this show has lived by the sword of a very intimate relationship with fans and needs to die only by that sword.”
It’s worth revisiting the words Harmon wrote on his Tumblr blog eight months ago, when “Community” fans were experiencing death drops in their stomachs over the show’s fate. At the time, it seemed likely the show would move to Hulu were it to have a second life. It was reported that Harmon was less than enthusiatic about this: “If you want to know the God’s honest truth, part of my ‘eh’ was coming from the unsettling thought of your passion for campaigns being once again exploited by this rather unfair, somewhat backward system, one that now treats you like it’s your responsibility to keep a show alive, like a corporation is doing you a favor by feeding you low-grade opiate through a regulated tube. … You deserve better. I love you guys, and at its best, ‘Community’ is me saying that over and over again, saying let’s get less mad at ourselves and each other, and more mad at the inhuman systems that keep us down and divided.”
Talks with Hulu fell apart, and Yahoo picked up the show. Unlike with other popular online shows such as “House of Cards” or “Transparent,” which release all of their episodes at once, “Community” will release the first two episodes together, then individual episodes weekly.
While the show won’t be radically different, it will introduce two characters to fill the departures of Yvette Nicole Brown and Donald Glover. Show loyalists already know Paget Brewster as Francesca Dart (and before that, as Debra Chambers). Keith David, who narrated an episode in 2012, will come back in bigger, more visible role.
