How ‘Community’ Created “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas”: An Oral History

Every sitcom is capable of at least one decent holiday episode, but it takes something special to break out from the joyfully oversaturated airwaves in December. That’s exactly what Community‘s second holiday episode, “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas,” was — something special.

True to the cult comedy’s up-for-anything ethos, the episode takes place entirely in stop motion animation, channeling both the classic Rankin/Bass Christmas specials and the sometimes somber tone of Peanuts cartoons. The episode is told through Abed’s (Danny Pudi) point of view. As he’s now seeing the world through claymation figures (or more sophisticated puppetry) he figures that this year is going to be an extra special Christmas. The only problem is no one else sees what he sees. In a sort of inverse of Community‘s beloved Dungeons and Dragons episodes, the rest of the episode dives between a stop motion version of Greendale Community College and the magical Christmas adventure unfolding in Abed’s mind. As he takes the gang through a winter wonderland filled with musical numbers, mystical caves, a murderous Christmas pterodactyl, and a Willy Wonka-esque assortment of rules, Professor Duncan (John Oliver) and Abed’s friends try to uncover the exact source of Abed’s mental breakdown before he hurts himself.

But this episode was more than merely an excuse to play with study group puppets for 22 minutes. Community‘s exploration into Abed’s unusual mental breakdown cut to the personal heart of the holiday season, skillfully blending an epic Christmas journey with a subtle, intimate, and surprisingly individual story about exactly why the holidays make us sad. It’s a study of loneliness and the realization that comes with growing up that everything isn’t always going to be merry, especially around the holidays. And yet in the midst of all this melancholy rests the same lesson Community preached from its first episode: finding your own tribe can save you.

“Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” originally aired on December 8, 2010, and since then has grown to be part of the modern Christmas canon. But NBC’s song-filled blend of wild imagination and overwhelming pathos almost didn’t happen. What popped up on screen was the result of a truly impressive breakneck production schedule, a dedicated team who wouldn’t take no for an answer, and no room for mistakes. In honor of one of the most ambitious Christmas specials network television has ever seen, Decider interviewed Community creator and episode writer Dan Harmon, director of “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” and Anomalisa Duke Johnson, and animator and Tumbleleaf creator Drew Hodges about what went into this 17 weeks of madness.

Getting the NBC Greenlight

The idea for animated Community episode didn’t come from Dan Harmon at all but from an NBC executive. 

Dan Harmon, Community creator and writer: When Comcast bought NBC for a very brief period there, between NBC presidents, there was this guy [former Chairman of NBC Universal] Jeff Gaspin, and I had a meeting with him. In that meeting he said, “Hey I love your show. It reminds me of Family Guy. You should do an animated episode.” And I took that to mean he wasn’t very familiar with the show. It didn’t sound like a profound connection, like I had a Community fan running the network or anything. We just kind of thought we could take advantage of that because there was a lot of tumult in the empire and the guy in charge did technically say, “You should do an animated episode.”

Duke Johnson, director: Dino [Stamatopoulos, who played Starburns on the show and was one of the writers] said “Hey, you should do it stop motion.” And then the idea of stop motion made Dan think immediately of Christmas and Dino also suggested, “It should be stop motion and Duke should direct it.” And that’s kind of how those elements came together.

Harmon: I had just started or was trying to start an animation studio with [Stamatopoulos] … And Dino had the idea of, “Why don’t you do a stop-motion Christmas episode for this season, and that’s animated. We could use the money to start up our studio.” So it was really just us telling the NBC executives, “Your boss said we should do an animated episode, so we’re gonna take a whack at it.”

Writing the Episode

On August 1 the idea for an animated episode was approved by NBC. By August 15, the script had been sent to animation. Because of the time stop motion animation takes, “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” had to be written and recorded before most of Season 2.

Harmon: I really can’t remember whose idea it was (in the writer’s room) to solve the problem of basically, stylistically, how is it not just kind of self indulgent, masturbatory, conceit for the sake of conceit to do a stop-motion animated episode?

It was a tough thing to decode. Why are we doing this, why would we be doing this? I can’t remember who it was in the writers’ room who proposed that the whole thing would be through the eyes of Abed. Because he would actually have a traumatic induced semi-psychotic break … There were other issues there that prevented us from mixing live action. I think that would’ve made the episode un-producible for whatever reasons.

We struggled with [the framing of the episode] for a while, and we only had a couple of hours. I remember being really impressed with ourselves because we really had to turn an outline around in like one working day if we were gonna make a schedule. We had just started shooting that season, Betty White was down on set, we were shooting episodes. It was fall and we were talking about airing a Christmas episode that winter. We had to really boogie. Saying that out loud makes me wonder how in the hell that’s even possible.

Johnson: Dino wrote a first draft, and Dan rewrote it, and it was pretty quick because we had to start fabricating things right away.

Harmon: We talked about Charles Schultz over and over again and how he really had to… As an artist, when they told him they wanted to adapt Peanuts to holiday specials, I remember hearing that Charles Schultz really had to fight for the melancholy factor.

I look back on it and feel like that’s a huge part of the holidays. I really wanted it to be [in the episode]. The alienation, the sense of stillness and melancholy that magnified that need for togetherness and humanity and compassion.

Johnson: It was pretty much like the first draft was, for the most part, the final draft.

Above: Director Duke Johnson films himself singing one of Annie’s (Alison Brie) songs in “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” to act as a model for the animation.

A Jaw-Dropping Animation Timeline

After the script was completed, James Fino (King of the Hill) and Joe Russo (The Simpsons) begin working on the design and production of 19 sets and 66 puppets. During this time the actors recorded their lines. On October 18, animation began with a scheduled premiere date of December 9.

Drew Hodges, animator: Usually for TV an animator is sort of expected — in a somewhat simpler style — to do about 10 seconds [of stop-motion animation] a day. And I think there were about six animators working on this full time. So you gotta do the calculation, I don’t know the exact thing, it’s a different formula, but four to six weeks is a little fast. I think usually it should probably take at least 12 weeks or so, depending on how many animators you have to do a 22 minute show.

Johnson: For me [the episode] was a big opportunity because I’d only done smaller Adult Swim shows. And this was actually my first big primetime half-hour episode of television. And so I was really motivated to say “Write anything. We’ll do it. We’ll find a way to do it.” We had that sort of bravery, I guess? And audacity to just kind of like go for it.

Hodges: I was working at another animation studio, 23D Films, and Starburns [Industries] approached them to help make the puppets while they got the rest of the studio going on their end. The time frame was so short that they kind of just needed a little bit of help. I saw that process happening, and I threw my hat in the ring for animation.

We were starting in October, it wrapped just before Thanksgiving or maybe the week after. I remember they were finishing up a few things. And then it aired a couple weeks after that. I have no idea how they got all that done.

No Room for Mistakes

Because of the episode’s rapid-fire turnaround time, every shot had to be close to perfect. Of course that never happened, forcing the team to get creative when it came to Pierce’s (Chevy Chase) puppet, the Christmas pterodactyl, and Season 2’s second surprise stop motion moment.

Johnson: They were planning ahead that the stop-motion was gonna be the Christmas episode, but they were still writing the other episodes and shooting the show as we go. So I think it became a later development that now Pierce is in a wheelchair, and it’s like “Oh… we have to figure out how to make that work in the show.”

I do remember [the wheelchair] being a late addition having to add that and figure that out. And then having some conflict because I think he’s barefoot if I remember correctly? Like he’s got a cast but his toes stick out or something. Whatever. He’s in a wheelchair, his toes are bare, but then when we shot the live action shot — the reflection of [the study group] in the TV at the end — Chevy refused to be barefoot. He insisted on wearing socks.

That always bugged me because I wanted it to match; but I also didn’t wanna have to challenge Chevy, because he’s really scary and intimidating. And kind of mean. So I just let it go and nobody ever really noticed, so it was fine.

Hodges: One of my big [scenes] was that pterodactyl coming down. The puppet had shown up right before I had to shoot it. It was not tested or functional or anything, so we set up the rig and we were just sort of hoping for the best.

At a certain point I couldn’t reach the puppet, so I was just poking with a stick to get it completed… But somehow, it all worked out. And I think that’s indicative. Everyone had those moments where it was very much the deep end and we just had to trust in the process for us to succeed at it … It was just a constant miracle that it was happening.

Duke Johnson is also credited for another stop motion scene in Community Season 2 — a conversation between Jeff (Joel McHale) and Britta (Gillian Jacobs) in the clip episode “Paradigms of Human Memory.” In an animated flashback it’s revealed that the two characters have been sleeping together since at least Christmas. 

Johnson: Sometime while we were shooting they came up with the idea for [“Paradigms of Human Memory”], and I think that was a way to save money on that episode potentially, because it was flashbacks to other episodes. So they wanted that additional scene, and we said that we could make it work as it took place in one of the sets that we already had. We were already shooting in Duncan’s office, so they wrote a quick little back and forth to take place in the office and we shot it at the same time.

The Cost of Abed’s Breakdown

During its five seasons on NBC, Community was notorious for going over budget and being renewed by the skin of its teeth. Unsurprisingly, one of the show’s most ambitious installments cost a little extra.

Harmon: Much like our first feature Anomalisa, Starburns’ legacy tends to be naiveté leading to ambition that we end up having to make work. [“Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas”] went pretty substantially over budget. We thought we were being quite clever financially. That we were gonna have money left over and we were gonna use the money to make the episode to get our studio up and running. But really, it just turned into another typical Community episode that was way over budget.

Johnson: I remember there was a joke or talking to Joel McHale at the wrap party, he said “Hey how much was this episode?” I said something like, “I think it was about one and a half times the cost of a normal episode.” And so he said, “Oh, the cost of a normal episode.”

A lot of the show went over budget, but [Dan Harmon] also invested a lot of his own money into the Christmas special. I remember he paid for all the cameras, and we ended up going over in visual effects.

We were very much isolated [filming the episode] and on our own. So when we went to shoot the show, the show was in 16×9, so we shot everything 16×9. And then halfway through the process one of the producers came to us and said that it has to be 4×3 camera safe… So we had to do a bunch of visual effects to extend some of the shots because characters would be on the fringes of the frames or something. That ended up costing a lot more in the visual effects.

According to TV Guide’s 2010 timeline of the episode, 23D Films turned in the final shots of”Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” on December 8. The episode premiered a day later on December 9. On its first airing it was watched by 4.29 million viewers— making it fall in line with an average episode of Community. But its legacy has lasted longer than that one night.

Johnson: I wasn’t expecting much more than it to be an episode of a season that people liked. But it was something that people kept coming back to and that [NBC] would air. They aired it the next few years, around Christmas they’d re-air it. And people seem to like it. When I’ve mentioned it to people in the real world that I worked on it they always say positive things. It’s been rewarding. It’s always good if you kill yourself to make something and then people like it.

Community‘s Sole Emmy

During its time on the air Community was nominated for four Emmys, but it only won once. In 2011 Drew Hodges took home the Emmy for Individual Achievement in Animation for his work on “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas.”

Hodges: There were a lot of great animators, and I definitely did not have as much experience as those people so [Emmy consideration] never crossed my mind. When I got that call, I couldn’t believe it.

Harmon: There was one Emmy given to one of the artists who sculpted the heads for the dolls. I think he got a Creative Arts Emmy for the episode.

Hodges: It was interesting because I think backstage in the green room they hadn’t even given — Dan Harmon and Alison Brie were presenting, and he made a joke about how they’d never won an Emmy or something. But then I had to kind of disprove that joke. Kind of a weird, interesting thing because I’m not a part of that show in any way. I just happened to jump on at this moment, so I could certainly feel for them having worked on it, put everything that they had into it for so many years and then this little fluke happened.

The Legacy of “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas”

More than just the episode, “nothing is too big” ethos of the episode influenced how the team approached the Oscar-nominated Anomalisa and the Emmy-winning Tumble Leaf, respectively — as well as the rest of the run of Community.

Harmon: It didn’t make the outside world say “Holy crap. You did it. We respect you now, this show will never be canceled.” What I maybe hoped it would accomplish. But what it did do is make TV critics in particular separate the show out.

I remember we were getting our first solid critical piece about Community, and I think it was maybe in New York Magazine or something like that where they picked it as their number one show in an end of the year review, and they put a still of that episode [Note: You can read Emily Nussbaum’s article here]. They used that because it has just aired and really talked about that episode in particular. It was a turning point.

I feel like it cast a spell on everyone involved with the show. The writers, the actors — it was like a potion that we made for ourselves and drank that made us fearless and proud of ourselves regardless of any outside circumstances from then on. It just made us feel like our own approval is good enough, and that’s actually what makes people out there happy.

The Golden Age of Television was upon us with the Breaking Bads and the things emerging, and we were a part of that because we had willfully chosen to be a part of that. We were always gonna shoot for excellence. It was its own reward, and we weren’t gonna do it for anticipation of anything anymore. In that sense it was like a little Christmas miracle for the show itself.

Note: Interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

Watch Community's "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas" on Hulu