Can a positive critical re-evaluation and heightening buzz help a struggling series when Emmy season rolls around? NBC is about to find out when it sees how voters respond to “Community.”

“As our season progressed, critics were starting to say nice things about our show,” series creator Dan Harmon notes.

Already, the number of critics enthusiastically jumping on the show’s bandwagon over the course of the season has helped secure the low-rated sitcom — starring Joel McHale and Chevy Chase as students at a mediocre community college — a second-season renewal.

“There wasn’t a great ratings story for the show, but increasingly, there was a lot of online chatter and critics standing up for the show,” says Jeff Ingold, Executive Vice President, Comedy Programming, NBC and Universal Media Studios, in charge of comedy development. “That helps in keeping a show strong in terms of how it’s perceived by the network. Hearing from objective third parties can keep these shows alive while waiting for audiences to find them.”

Read the full story on Variety

411mania has an interview with Joel McHale from Community; here are some of the highlights:

effrey Harris: So what is going on with Community is it coming back for a second season?

Joel McHale: It is. It got picked up for 22 episodes.

Jeffrey Harris: So what is it like to be a part of this great, fun show and you got a hilarious ensemble cast?

Joel McHale: God bless you . . . 411mania, God bless you . . . thank you for watching.

Jeffrey Harris: So what’s going to happen with Jeff and Britta?

Joel McHale: You’ll see. You’ll know as things progress. It gets pretty crazy.

Jeffrey Harris: Between you and me, Jeff and Britta is my OTP. My One True Pairing.

Joel McHale: Wow! That is good and bad — no.

Jeffrey Harris: Are they yours though?

Joel McHale: I refer to our head writer and creator Dan Harmon, our genius . . . I think the character of Jeff that I play, he’s learning not to be diabolical.

Jeffrey Harris: At first he’s very sort of self-absorbed –

Joel McHale: Yeah.

Jeffrey Harris: But as he interacts with the group, he becomes a better person.

Joel McHale: Well everything has been stripped away from him and he is forced to kind of deal with these human relationships.

Jeffrey Harris: When I first started watching the show, I’m like, “This guy’s a jerk!” He’s a phony lawyer!

Joel McHale: Yeah.

Jeffrey Harris: It’s like why should I like this guy? But then as you see him interact with the other characters, he starts opening up and more and even helping them out like Pierce and Abed. It’s almost like the group is coming together as a family.

Joel McHale: Yeah. I mean there’s weird little hints that Dan drops in that’s like, the guy has not seen his mom in a long time, hasn’t told her he’s in school. So he’s got these hang-ups that he hasn’t dealt with. But yeah, these people he would never associate with become his family.

As if creator Dan Harmon and Co. reached into our brain only to discover two of the things that make us happiest — chicken fingers (Yes we have our local Popeye’s on speed dial, what’s it to you?) and the movie Goodfellas (A movie that we’ve lost count of how many times we’ve seen as a result of our inability to turn it off anytime we accidentally come across it on AMC, which if you know AMC is pretty much every-other-weekend!) —last night’s hilarious instalment of COMMUNITY felt as if it was written directly for us. Seriously.

Read the rest of the story on TV.com

TVGuide.com checked in with executive producer Dan Harmon to see what’s ahead for the students of Greendale. Here are some of the highlights:

TVGuide.com: Congratulations on the Season 2 renewal. How does it feel?
Harmon: Thank you very much. It’s very exciting. The feeling in the production offices is surprisingly normal. I guess we’re so close to the finish line for the end of the season, that somehow the human brain is capable of tucking that news away while we focus on the task at hand.

TVGuide.com: Are you already tossing around ideas for Season 2?
Harmon: No, not at all really. We’ve never profited from thinking ahead on this show. We don’t hatch great schemes. I’m pretty proud to say that Season 2 is a blank canvas at this point.

TVGuide.com: What can you tease for the last few episodes?
Harmon: The last two episodes will be incredibly rewarding to fans of the show and newcomers alike. The very last episode will move in accordance with the school year, so it will be their prom. There’s a transfer dance to honor all the kids who are transferring to real schools, none of which are our characters. It’s essentially a reunion because every single character that ever popped up is at this dance.

TVGuide.com: This raises the question: What happens when your cast starts graduating?
Harmon: That is the scary thing about the show, but I also think that’s part of its secret allure. Jeff needs to replace his four-year degree, so we know that character is at that college for that. What we don’t know is what the other characters’ situations are. One of the first things we’ll do in Season 2 is actually call our shots there and start saying what their situations are.

TV Fanatic has the scoop on how this season of Community is going to end – with a Greendale prom:

“We’re definitely going to give the fans something worthy of a finale,” said producer Dan Harmon. “We follow the school year, so we get to do prom. It has to end with a prom-bang, my homage to a Dawson’s Creek-y vibe.”

Overall, “the last couple of episodes satisfy all the urges you have about Community. We’re batting cleanup with the drama, the sap and the comedy, as well,” Harmon added.

Dan Harmon, an executive producer of NBC’s “Community,” filmed himself telling his cast that the freshman year sitcom had been picked up for a second season. We already know the good news, but here is the cast’s reaction:

Source: NY Times

On Milwaukee choose Community as one of the best TV shows of 2009:

1. NBC’s Thursday night comedies. Just as it was in the days of “Seinfeld” and “Cheers,” and “The Cosby Show” before that, NBC’s Thursday night is again must-see TV.

It starts at 7 p.m. with the newest entry, “Community,” created by ComedySportz alum Dan Harmon and featuring Marquette gradDanny Pudi. That’s followed by the most improved show of 2009, Amy Poehler‘s “Parks and Recreation,” which has moved beyond its roots as a clone of the documentary style of “The Office.”

This year’s “The Office” is dealing with the uncertainties of the economic mess we’re all in and “30 Rock” remains the daffiest show on television.

The best way to digest the night is to DVR the lineup and watch each episode twice, just so you don’t miss all the hidden gems.

What seemed in early fall a rare outbreak of inspired television writing has in recent months become something rarer—not an epidemic, exactly, but a season impressively stocked with creations drenched in wit and enterprise, all unmistakably reflective of a drive toward formula busting. These things are, of course, always relative. In television these days, one quality hit a season—especially in the impossibly snare-infested comedy genre—seems a lot; two is like breaking the bank.

Yet we’re now finishing a television year that has seen both the emergence of ABC’s uproarious“Modern Family” and its less dazzling but wonderfully mordant lead-in, “The Middle,” about another kind of modern family—a brew of consistent charm and character with a bracing hint of nightmarish reality underlying its sitcom fun. Add to these the most unexpected gem of all—NBC’s “Community,” a satire set in the unlikely precincts of a community college. Its creator, Dan Harmon, was, by his own account, inspired by the semester he once spent at one in pursuit of an effort to strengthen ties with his girlfriend. That relationship didn’t work out in the end, but, happily, the same can’t be said of this whip-smart series about an improbably compelling band of adults taking classes at a sunny academic hell called Greendale Community College.

…

The same can be said for “Community,” which stars Joel McHale (“The Soup”) in top form as Jeff—a glib but undeniably attractive former lawyer who has gone back to school because his license to practice was revoked (he’d apparently skipped going to law school). The difference here is that the laughs derive entirely from the show’s flinty heart. There are lapses, to be sure, when its creators can’t resist the old siren call—the sitcom impulse to dump a little treacle into the brine. That way lies ruin, as most writers of satire ultimately learn. And “Community” is, despite its doses of warmth and fellowship, nothing but satire in its look at the adults in the study group Jeff runs. They’re all strivers, most of them bent on getting close to Jeff because this disbarred lawyer seems a person of stature. These characters are the product of cold-eyed observation, exquisite at its meanest, particularly when it focuses on an older student—the insufferably pompous Pierce, a character to which Chevy Chase brings considerable authority, and not surprisingly. None of this is to say the series doesn’t offer more varied targets of amusement. Its picture of the sorry lot of obsessives and other deranged types in charge of delivering learning at the college, and of the assorted weasels and buffoons serving as deans and other high officials, is priceless.

Read the full story on the WSJ

the Dean of Admissions, Pat Isakson (played by series creator Dan Harmon) welcomes potential students to the school by presenting the straight A’s of Greendale:

• Accessibility,
• Affordability,
• Air Conditioning,
• Awesome New Friends and
• A Lot of Classes.