Why did Paget Brewster play two characters on Community? The actress is best known for portraying Frankie Dart during season 6, but that wasn't the first character the actress played on the series. Community was created by Dan Harmon and ran for five seasons on NBC before moving to Yahoo! Screen for a sixth and final season. Though the series primarily focused on a study group at Greendale Community College, cast departures resulted in a few character additions in the final two installments.
Brewster, a Massachusetts native, relocated to New York City to attend design school before dropping out to pursue acting. Her first notable role came in 1997-8 with a guest appearance as Kathy in Friends season 4. The character, who dated both Chandler and Joey, appeared in a total of six episodes. Aside from roles in movies and recurring TV gigs, her most recognizable work came in Criminal Minds in which Brewster played Supervisory Special Agent Emily Prentiss between 2006 and 2020. Most recently, the actress appeared in Ryan Murphy's latest Netflix drama, Hollywood.
Before Brewster portrayed Frankie, however, she played Debra Chambers, a network administrator who worked at the college's IT department during season 5. When Brewster was promoted to one of the main characters in Community season 6, she played a brand new character. Frankie was the consultant that Dean Pelton (Jim Rash) brought in after a roof collapsed under the watch of the current Save Greendale Committee. With her no-nonsense attitude, Frankie made immediately made changes to campus, which rubbed a few figures the wrong way, particularly Jeff Winger (Joel McHale), Annie Edison (Alison Brie), and Britta Perry (Gillian Jacobs). Despite Frankie's seemingly boring personality, the group eventually accepted her once they got to know her better. Debra, however, disappeared, but the series made a clever reference to her whereabouts.
How Frankie Cleared Up Debra's Fate In Community
In the season 6 episode titled "Queer Studies & Advanced Waxing," Frankie was facing the campus-wide wifi shut down. To find a solution, Frankie reached out to the IT department by phone and email, but she never received a response. She mentioned that the IT woman was missing, insinuating that she had abandoned her position. The woman that Frankie was referring to was in fact Debra, her initial Community character. Abed Nadir (Danny Pudi) later figured out that the connection issues were due to a bird's nest in the router box. Based on Debra's absence, Dean Pelton urged Frankie to hire Elroy Patashnik (Keith David) as the head of the IT department.
To poke fun at Brewster's double-casting even further, Frankie claimed that her emails sent back to Debra bounced back in Aramaic and when she called, all she could hear was a loud whistling noise that made her nose bleed. This suggested that there was some weird type of alternate dimension or telekinetic connection between the two figures. In reality, the series was in the midst of creating Frankie as a new consultant and loved Brewster's first Community performance so much that they asked her to return.