Dan Harmon Was 'Blown Away' To See Some Of His Ideas Used During Season 4 Of 'Community'

Back when Dan Harmon was replaced as showrunner of Community, the conventional wisdom was that his removal was due to the show’s low ratings and “inaccessibility” (as well some other well-documented issues, but that’s not necessarily the point, this time). To address the latter, which would have ideally solved the former, NBC and Sony brought in Moses Port and David Guarascio from Just Shoot Me and Happy Endings to give the show both “heart” and a new-ish, more palatable, less-Harmon-y direction, in general. That makes this next paragraph pretty surprising, and a little infuriating.

“There was a whiteboard in the writers’ room that had about 10 ideas we never got around to because they posed too difficult a creative challenge,” Harmon says. “I was blown away to see [my replacements] were going down that list: doing an Inspector Spacetime convention; having Winger reconcile with his dad; the Pierce haunted house. It was a creative agenda I thought was the reason I got fired.” [TV Guide]

So there’s two sides to this. The first is that a decent chunk of the staff from Season 3 was still around during Season 4, so to the extent these ideas were brainstormed by the group, I suppose they had a right to try to see them through, especially seeing as no one anywhere had any idea that Dan Harmon would be invited to return to the show he was just unceremoniously catapulted out of. It was a super uncertain time, so clinging to any sort of certainty they could find would be a little understandable. Who knows, maybe they just thought they could get the best of both worlds: appease the show’s current rabid fan base by using the framework that was in place AND put their own touch on it to draw in new viewers and please the bosses. That wouldn’t have been a totally unreasonable thing to think, all things considered.

The other side is efffffffffffffffffffffff this a little bit, you know?

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