1. Set Up A Movie
NBC#sixseasonsandamovie. That's been the chant this whole time, adopted ever since the threat of the guillotine was dangled over the show in the second season, the phrase hardcore fans have found themselves repeating whenever it looked like the blade was finally going to come down and cut Community's lifespan tragically short. And now, the first half of that phrase has become flesh: as a group, we have cast a spell, and watched it come to pass. Which means that, following the sixth season on Yahoo, we should get...a movie? Again, there's the comparison to Arrested Development. For years the rumour wasn't that we'd get a fourth season of the show, but that we'd get a movie that would wrap up the story of the Bluth family. That didn't end up being the case, but then the rumours changed so that the revived series on Netflix would exist as a set-up for a motion picture adaptation of the series; especially since the fourth season ended on a cliffhanger, and the streaming video site have confirmed that they won't be making another season. For Community, there are a few issues it shares with a potential Arrested Development movie. For one, that movie still hasn't been made, and it's been mooted for years; with a similarly niche popularity, there might not be many studios willing to take the chance on a big screen version of the show. For another, movie versions of TV shows don't have a particularly great precedent. In the UK we have the trend of BBC sitcoms of the seventies becoming films, usually just repeating a classic storyline for the show and artificially stretching it to 90 minutes. In the US the Sex and the City franchise has lived on on the silver screen, although most critics agree it shouldn't. The real question, though, is whether Community can possibly stand up as a movie. Is there a story big enough that requires a feature length to be told properly? Harmon can certainly pen a good screenplay, as he did with underrated children's horror flick Monster House. Can he do the same for a property that has always been designed for the small screen, though, something which works because it's a sitcom that turns the genre on its head? If we stick to that road map, then season six of Community would have to go a ways to not only convincing us a movie is necessary, but also setting up what the story of that movie would be. Which, if the film is going to happen, we really want to see;, however, from the way Yahoo's been talking, they envision the show continuing on as just that - a show - possibly past a sixth season. And y'know what? We'd be pretty happy with that, too.