Donald Glover has achieved heights in his career that very few performers his age do. After a prominent writing stint in the crackpot sitcom 30 Rock, Glover landed his breakout role in one of the most subversive comedy shows on television, NBC’s Community. The show regularly bent, broke, and reversed clichés on their heads but only found more mainstream popularity after going off-air.
A mere few years after exiting Dan Harmon’s creation in its fifth season, Glover went on to make waves in the musical sphere with his alter ego Childish Gambino. Then he created and starred in Atlanta, a seminal piece of work bound to influence future generations to come. Now Glover is all set to return to the Community movie. There are a number of ways he can transition back into his role that does not just feed into fan nostalgia but shows growth in the character.
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The Surreal Similarities Between Atlanta & Community
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Atlanta in a way triggered the resurgence of Afro-surrealism along with films like Get Out and Sorry to Bother You. During a panel for Atlanta, Glover described Atlanta to be a show that is about being black and how it’s hard to pen it all down since it is “something that you have to feel.” But his previous work is a testament to the fact that he is well-versed in writing down and performing things that are often difficult to put down in words.
While Atlanta has done a brilliant job in marrying absurdism with reality, Community often catapulted itself from being a sincere comedy about seven misfits to delivering a surreal experience on the regular. Both shows were fluid enough to become whatever they wanted to be from one week to another. Glover’s Troy Barnes was as much the heart of Community as his Earn Marks was the pivot Atlanta revolved around, even in the episodes he was prominently missing from.
How Donal Glover’s Brilliance Shines
NBC
From the happy-go-lucky Troy Barnes to his poignant portrayal of Earn Marks, Glover gave us two very iconic television characters who went on their very own coming-of-age journeys that created liminal spaces a growing Millennial generation could escape to. From playing a nerdy jock in a show that regularly featured poultry mafias, zombies, and paintball warfare, Glover transitioned to a brilliant Princeton dropout navigating Atlanta’s hip-hop scene in a show that had glowing lemon pepper chicken wings, invisible cars, and old men offering Nutella sandwiches to random strangers on busses.
Donald Glover’s brilliance shines through every inch of these two stories. While Community existed for almost two seasons without Troy, it was never the same after he left. After leaving the show, Glover went through an enormous metamorphosis publicly and personally, as he revealed through his social media posts. He was keen on closing chapters in order to be able to make space for what he could potentially become.
How Glover Kept His Love For Community Alive
During the previously mentioned panel, Glover had commented, “I think everything should have death clauses in them. I’m glad things end because it forces them to progress. It wasn’t like I was running away from it, I was just done with it. I had so much fun on Community, but there’s a reason why Dan ended the show. He likes endings too.”
Not only are Harmon and Glover ready to revive their roles with Community, along with most of the OG cast, Glover did keep certain glimpses of his love for Community alive through the years. Recently Ibra Ake, one of the writers for Atlanta, shared a list of shows they were asked to watch and Community made the cut. One of the overviews shared, “Stay away from cliches unless it helps us,” was essentially the Community mantra.
The shows had more traces of each other in them apart from Glover and his prestige. Most recently, we saw a hint of Troy in the Mr. Chocolate character from Atlanta. He appears in the season four episode “Work Ethic!” which takes a look at Black art, especially what makes it good or bad. However, what made this episode, and particularly Mr. Chocolate’s character, even more interesting is the body language Glover displays to portray this caricature. It is very reminiscent of the body humor we saw him do with Troy. After staying away from the kind of comedy reflected in his previous eras as an artist, it was delightfully dippy to see him in this avatar.
How Glover Can Step Back Into Community
The recent reboot of Gilmore Girls made the mistake of showing most of the main characters in a state of arrested development in order to capitalize on a nostalgia-struck fan base. This is the pitfall we hope Community avoids. Given how long the reboot has been in the making, it shouldn’t be a difficult job because the only thing common between the two was the inclusion of pop culture references galore.
One of the explanations given for Troy’s exit was that he had to go out of his comfort space in order to come into his own. That was the caveat from Pierce (Chevy Chase) who left all his wealth to Troy, who seemed determined to go on the adventure because he wanted to grow out of his shell. Will the new Troy reflect that?
We do expect Troy to be more worldly-wise in the reboot, with the generosity of his old self intact, which Pierce in his own twisted way had wanted and encouraged in him. But where Harmon takes him from there would be intriguing. Will he address what the characters did during the pandemic or bypass that completely?
Perhaps Troy reconnects with his bestie Abed during the pandemic. Maybe during quarantine they put their newly acquired wealth and talent together to make terrible films that find an oddball fan base in a meta-commentary about content creators worthy of existing in either universe of Community and Atlanta. The melding of these two Glovers will be fascinating to witness nonetheless.
Of course, Troy needed to find an identity, a persona that thrived beyond his dynamic with Abed. While we would love to see the duo come together and make sparks fly again, we also hope to see how far these characters have come since we left them on the optimistic #SixSeasonsAndAMovie catchall.
