Dan Harmon is thankful that the decision about including Chevy Chase in the upcoming Community movie isn’t his to make.
“It’s not up to me, which I think is a nice thing,” Harmon told Obsessed: The Podcast. “I wasn’t on Season 4 when the legend really hit the fan, but there were consequences, and those consequences have to do with other people feeling safe in a workplace that I create. And I was never great at that in the first place. And thank God this is not up to me.”
Harmon, who created NBC’s cult hit sitcom, and Chase, who played out-of-touch millionaire Pierce Hawthorne on the show, publicly feuded throughout filming, culminating in NBC firing Chase after it came to light that he allegedly used the N-word on set during Season 4.
Peacock announced the long-awaited movie follow-up to the six-season comedy series in 2022, in line with the viral fan campaign that demanded “six seasons and a movie.”
Community centers around a slew of misfits who form a study group at Greendale Community College. The movie will include almost all of the original cast members, including Joel McHale, Danny Pudi, Alison Brie, Gillian Jacobs, Jim Rash, Ken Jeong, Donald Glover, and Yvette Nicole Brown. Chase’s notable omission from the list is a result of his inability to play nice with others while filming, according to Harmon.
“People need to be respected and heard,” Harmon said. “It would be truly insulting and trivializing and dehumanizing to just go, well, he’s an Amigo!” he added, referring to Chase’s classic Three Amigos role. “It’s all about the popcorn, right? Well, no, it’s not.”
Community star Joel McHale has said he doesn’t think Chevy would want to be in the film, even if presented with the opportunity. And even if he did, McHale suggested he might not be “allowed” to return.
“I don’t think it would happen,” McHale said in 2024. “Obviously his unceremonious departure in Season 4 pretty much did that in.”
“I feel like my role in his life was to lock him in a hot cage for 12-hour shifts with a bunch of people and force him, for only the second time in a legendary career, to try to work with others and not be a soloist, which we all knew was his essence,” Harmon recalled of their time together making the series. “And he suffered for it. It was a confusing time for him. Television at that point was really thankless work and hard work. He was surrounded by people that knew that and were fine with it. But he was perhaps justifiably bewildered by how many takes were required and how much cooperation was needed in order to land that fish.”
He added that working with Chase felt like “flint and steel,” and that he’s “so glad” the “effect that he and I working together was having on my personal life” is “over.”
Harmon, who is currently Emmy-nominated for the ninth series of his animated series Rick and Morty, would tell writers who found his behind-the-scenes methods “abusive” that they would thank him when they won an Emmy Award.
“Well,” he joked, “we didn’t get one.”
Referring to the N-word debacle, the creator also said Chase’s unpopularity among the cast and fans came from more than a single incident.
“I can certainly say, objectively, that it’s not a case of, like, ‘this guy didn’t mind his P’s and Q’s’ that one time and all of a sudden cancel culture came in,” he said. “It was like, yeah, this is an avalanche. The avalanche started where the snow was on that mountain. It was balanced precariously.”
Community experienced a surge of popularity upon its Netflix release in 2020 despite a lack of mainstream success when it aired years earlier.
Harmon knows it’s been a long time since Peacock announced the movie, but he confirmed that is definitely still happening. He admits that it’s been challenging to “corral” all of the actors in the midst of their busy schedules. But he also knows that rabid Community fans will read into anything he says that might make it seem like the whole thing could fall apart.
“Saying that is like shooting a gun on a submarine,” he explained. “Like, there’s gonna be so many ricochets because it’s not only can two things be true; a thousand things are true at the same time. I can truthfully say, it’s hard to wrangle all the actors’ schedules.”
“The audience will then get the impression that maybe we’re all, like, in a conspiracy to make their lives some kind of purgatory where they’re waiting for this movie for the next century,” Harmon continued. “But there’s an objective truth, which is that you can get aligned for windows. And let’s say, for instance, if that window isn’t a window in which I feel like I’ve written the Citizen Kane of adaptations of my own TV show, the buck stops here in that regard. If that window then closes, then we gotta find the open window again.”
Harmon wishes he could give fans a specific timeline, but he isn’t sure when he’ll find that open window. He even said there’s a “perverse” part of him that sometimes wants the project to die once and for all. He thinks that providing fans a definitive answer, regardless of what it may be, would be kinder than the project’s current status of eternal limbo.
“I just hate that every time I have to talk about it I sound like an alcoholic father talking about some trip to the zoo that’s never gonna happen,” he said. “And that they’re just slowly having to go to therapy and work it out. So that’s why I fantasize sometimes. I would love to just be like, ‘Guys, it’s dead, it can’t happen,’ because it would give them closure, like a true crime story.”
“But,” he went on, “I guess the silver lining there is that I am not saying that, and if I thought it were accurate, I would. Instead, I have to drag this like a serial killer on death row who keeps revealing more bodies. There’s more to tell. It’s still happening.”
The ninth season of Harmon’s Rick and Morty is streaming now on HBO Max, and his new spin-off series, President Curtis, premieres on Adult Swim on Sunday, July 26.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel to watch new episodes of ‘Obsessed: The Podcast’ every Wednesday and Friday. And follow our feed to listen to the show the next morning on your favorite podcast platform.
