Last year, Community creator Dan Harmon returned to his beloved NBC comedy—after a bizarre, highly publicized flare-up with the network, which fired him after the show’s third season. The reunion came as a relief to the comedy’s devoted fans—who had watched the clever show’s fourth season devolve into a sloppy, unfortunate iteration of its former self—but also as an odd surprise. Because, after all, since when does NBC take back its disappointing decisions? Apparently, when Joel McHale is there to act as mediator.

During a new interview with Hiftix’s Alan Sepinwall, Harmon gives his most detailed account yet of how his return to the network was facilitated, mostly by the show’s lead actor. Asked when Harmon knew that NBC and Sony might be interested in his return, the Community mastermind reveals, “It was a call from Joel McHale but I didn’t take him seriously. I just thought [he] was a very loyal, passionate actor calling an old friend to let him know that he was missed after concluding a year of work without him.”

So there were a few phone calls where he would call me and talk about how I was missed and then he would say, “Would you come back if you could come back?” And I would say, “Well, I don’t need to know the answer to that question.” He said, “Well, are you open to the question being asked, if they were to ask you to come back?” And I said, “Well, if for purely theoretical reasons for this conversation, yes, if Sony and NBC both asked at the same time, yeah, I would be open to them asking. I would be able to say yes or no.” [...] There were two or three phone calls like that from Joel with increasing emphasis on the idea that he was gonna talk to so and so and he was gonna make this happen and I still really just thought it was all folly. Obviously because in 60 years of television – this is not something that happens. And if it ever is, it’s not something that doesn’t get brokered by an actor.

Fortunately though, McHale proved that statement wrong, teaching Harmon a very important lesson in the process.

So shame on me for underestimating Joel McHale about the last thing in my life that I’ll ever underestimate him for. Because it appears now that he can do anything. Yeah, and then all of a sudden one day my agent called me and said, ‘Sony wants to know if you’re interested. They think that they can possibly goose the numbers going into a fifth season which will get us very close to 100 with the publicity surrounding your return.” So that’s typical: human beings tend to think in terms of good guys and bad guys but corporations just go, “Okay, we thought we’d change this light bulb and that it would save us money. Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. Let’s put the old one back. That’ll save us money.”

And there we have it: Dan Harmon’s re-origin story at Community. On behalf of fans of the comedy, which has reclaimed all of its quirky cleverness during its fifth season, we’d like to say, “Thank you, Joel McHale.”