This past week, I had the chance to speak to several cast members from Community at NBC's Upfront event in New York. It's still a couple of months until production begins on Season 3 of the show, so when it came to specifics on what will happen next, they knew as little as we do. But we did discuss the events of the last few episodes of Season 2 and a bit about what could be in store, considering where things left off.
One of Community's most audacious episodes this season (which is saying something) involved their take on a classic sitcom "Remember the time when…?" clip show, except in this case, all the scenes we were seeing were brand new. A big revelation in that episode was that Jeff and Britta had been sleeping together all season, something Gillian Jacobs said creator Dan Harmon never directly told them prior to that episode. Recalled Jacobs, "We sort of knew a little hint of it, because we did the voices for the stop-motion animation portion of that earlier. But above and beyond that, no. And I actually kind of forgot about it for a while and I was like, 'Are they ever gonna use that?' And then yes, sure enough, who could imagine that clip show episode?'"

Alison Brie and Joel McHale at NBC's 2011 Upfront
The final two episodes of Season 2 involved seeing some great paintball-inspired moments for the female characters – first from Annie in the first part, and then from Shirley and Britta in the second, who managed to (almost) be the last two standing, taking out an army of City College paintball invaders. Yvette Nicole Brown told me getting to play Shirley, Action Hero, "Was amazing. I love that in those last two episodes, the girls got to really be the characters that went far. The guys were busy thinking and strategizing and the girls were the ones with the guns going, 'Bang bang! Take that!' It was really awesome."

Brie humorously recalled Danny Pudi's, "Thanks a lot!" response to that, and that she assured him, "No, Danny, you're very sexy man, but you're my best friend in the world." She added, "The upside of that is we feel so comfortable with each other, but the downside was we could not keep a straight face. Literally, we had to get the giggles out of our system and then we had to stop and hold hands, take some deep breaths, and we were like, 'Hey, we can do this. Let's just go for it!' And of course then, once we started doing it, they made us do it so many times and be covered in paint and do all this stuff. By the end of it, we were like, 'Alright, alright. Let's go! Let's get this over with!' For the record, Danny's a great kisser!"

The final moments of Season 2 (excluding the funny tag with Abed and a Greendale cleaning staff member) were not very upbeat, to say the least, as Pierce (Chevy Chase) rejected the group's offer to re-join their study group. When it came to Community moving between big comedy moments to a scene like that, Jacobs said, "I'd like to think that we walk that line and maybe this is the strongest example of that, between comedy and then genuinely emotional moments between characters. I like that things have consequences on our show. It wasn't just like Pierce got over his hurt or his anger. And it played out, really, for the second half of our season, this anger he had towards us."
Going forward, Brown remarked, "Pierce seemed to be very upset, so I don't know how they're going to work it out. The good thing about our show is that it's such a rich canvas at Greendale, Pierce could still be at Greendale and not be in the study group. He could be the villain the way that Senor Chang was the villain the first season. You just never know how it's going to work out."

Continued McHale, "That's one of the reasons that Dan is such a genius, is because he takes those conventions, like with Britta and Jeff - 'Will they, won't they?' And he's like, 'No, in fact, they did, and it was all year long.' Or Shirley having a baby, where people are like, 'You're going to jump the shark! It always happens when people have babies on shows!' It's like, 'No, people have babies in real life and life goes on after that.' Dan always comes up with stuff that I can't believe his imagination puts out. So I don't know what to expect. I mean, we could come back and be part of a Mongolian horde, storming across China. Who knows?"
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Connections for Community
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