'Community' Season 6 Scoop: Dan Harmon on Making His Beloved Show Even Better

Community fans are still in full celebration mode about their beloved sitcom being saved, but when will we actually see it on screen? Yahoo caught up with creator Dan Harmon — whose Harmontown documentary debuts this October — and he had a bit more insight into when they're back writing, when they'll start shooting, and what we can all expect. Pop pop!

Any updates on start of production for Community Season 6?
Yeah cameras will be rolling on November 17, and we're going to start with writers September 8. So yeah, I don't know what Yahoo plans to do with what we deliver to them on what schedule — that's up to them — but it would seem to me that we will start to see a new season of Community sometime in the new year.

[Related: 'Community' Lives! Yahoo Has Saved Greendale for a Sixth Season]

Are you approaching the show any differently now that it's on the web?
I definitely want to sit down with the writers and talk to them about that first, but I don't consider it my job to make the show unrecognizable. I want it to feel enough like the Community that people love that they can think of it that way.
 
If there's benefits to being on Yahoo instead of NBC I think it's going to have a lot to do with the fact that, now, watching the show on your computer isn't a crime. It's not going to be discouraged, and if we do tie-ins with the characters as real people that are living in a post-millennial age where everyone's existing and connecting on computers, I think that Yahoo over NBC will be able to roll with those creative choices. If we want to do special things that are interactive or things like that… it won’t just fall on deaf ears. I think the old broadcast networks are still looking at the internet like this new thing, and certainly Yahoo is not. So there might be some really cool ancillary benefits to belonging to a company that understands the new world as much as the show does.

[Related: Watch the 'Community' Season 6 Teaser Trailer]

But as far as the length of the show, the pacing of the show, the tone of the show, I think it would be a mistake to suddenly have everyone saying the word "sh--" every five minutes or smoking cigarettes or running people over with their cars or having the episodes be 40 minutes long. I think people are probably feeling a little nervous about the show that they love. A lot of these fans, they grew up on the show; it's been on for six years, so there were people who were 12 years old when they started liking the show and are actually going to be voting soon and have had this show in the background their entire adult lives… I think they're already worried enough about the show changing because it's changing venues, so I want to make them feel comfortable, first and foremost, and then I want to surprise them with how much better the show can be, hopefully, now that it's out of its cocoon.

Watch to hear more about Community Season 6 from Harmon, Chris McKenna, and stars Gillian Jacobs and Jim Rash: