Explaining Community’s ‘Gas Leak Year’ Led To Some Wild Ideas In The Writers Room

Harmon was asked about how it all went down, and said they spoke with new writers for two days, exploring all their options. “We talked about everything, no matter how absurd,” he explained. 

So what were some of these ideas? The first one Harmon mentioned had to do with Troy (Donald Glover) and Abed (Danny Pudi)’s Dreamatorium, the grid-like second bedroom that serves as a sort of “Star Trek” holodeck for their imaginary (or are they?) adventures in un-reality. He said: 

“First of all, including Danny Pudi coming out of the cardboard Dreamatorium in his apartment at the beginning of season 5 and shaking it off and saying, ‘That was weird.’ I mean, insane things like just finding out that the Greendale that we had seen for that year was actually some strange underground test facility.”

After the two days of writer discussions were up, he asked them a question: “Okay, so we know every single possibility. So what do we think we really need to do? What is really our job?” He said that there was complete agreement that they had to do sort of a new pilot “about the protagonist returning to his alma mater with whom he had a complex emotional relationship. We wanted to write a story that would hold up to the standard of a brand new television show being rolled out by NBC.”