Pedro Pascal breaking and Donald Glover's early exit: Highlights from the Community table read
Today (or actually a while ago because it was pre-taped) the Community cast got back together to raise money for charity with a live table read of “Cooperative Polygraphy,” the episode where the study group has to endure shocking reveals and harsh truths while reading from the will of Chevy Chase’s character Pierce (who died off-camera). You can watch it for yourself right here, but if you’d like to know what you’re getting into, we watched it for you and picked out some highlights.
For starters, Keith Slettedahl from The 88 stopped by to perform the theme song live, followed by Community creator Dan Harmon offering up new coronavirus lyrics about washing hands and not smelling farts. Then, unfortunately, Donald Glover had to duck out, with Harmon explaining that he was so busy that he could only commit to actually doing a few pages of the table read. It makes sense, since he’s super famous these days, but it’s still a shame. (It’s also just a gag, he comes back right after.)
There’s also some fun running commentary from noted perfectionist Dan Harmon, who manages to take some time during this fun charity video to jokingly mention some notes he has for things in the script that don’t work as well as he thinks they should. It’s an extremely Dan Harmon shtick for anyone who has followed some of the behind-the-scenes stories from anything he has been involved with ever, and the reading ends with a nice tag (well, nice for us who didn’t have to work with him) where he asks everyone to stick around so he can do some rewrites.
We also have to bring up Pedro Pascal’s turn during the live read as Mr. Stone, the character Walton Goggins played in the actual episode. He fits right in with the rest of the cast, but one of the highlights is the way he starts to laugh harder and harder during the sequence where everyone is bequeathed canisters of Pierce’s frozen sperm. The joke doesn’t really get to breathe in the episode, since it comes alongside some heartwarming revelations about how Pierce really felt about his Greendale friends, but Pascal breaking makes it even funnier than it was before.
The cast also held a Q&A session that touched on some stories from the making of the show (Gillian Jacobs notes that Community killed Yahoo Screen even though everyone got mad at us when we said that) and what the characters would be doing now—Alison Brie, knowing who signs her checks, says Annie would be watching Netflix. Glover also briefly shatters any hope for Troy to return in the movie (which will totally happen someday) by saying that he probably died on his big ocean journey, but he also suggests that Danny Pudi’s Abed might be on an adventure of his own trying to rescue Troy (cue Harmon furiously writing on a notepad in the video).
Oh, but speaking of the movie: Glover says he’d be willing to do it! So now it’s just a matter of him actually finding time to do it… and then Harmon tricking someone into giving him enough money to do it. So yeah, it’ll totally happen someday.