BRITTA'D! 'Community' Creator Dan Harmon Reacts to His Firing

Shortly after I posted my article about Community's new showrunners and what that meant for the show's future, Dan Harmon himself took to the Internet to set the record straight on the whole situation. And the record's ugly.

Where was I? Oh yeah. I’m not running Community for season 4. They replaced me. Them’s the facts.

In a lengthy blog post, Harmon confirmed that he not only was he out as Community showrunner, but he found out the same we all did — by reading about it online. NBC never contacted him to let him know he was out or why they were replacing him, network chairman Robert Greenblatt has apparently never even talked to him, and his consulting producer position gives him zero power to affect the direction of the show he created.

You may have read that I am technically “signed on,” by default, to be an executive consulting something or other - which is a relatively standard protective clause for a creator in my position. Guys like me can’t actually just be shot and left in a ditch by Skynet, we’re still allowed to have a title on the things we create and “help out,” like, I guess sharpening pencils and stuff. 

However, if I actually chose to go to the office, I wouldn’t have any power there. Nobody would have to do anything I said, ever. I would be “offering” thoughts on other people’s scripts, not allowed to rewrite them, not allowed to ask anyone else to rewrite them, not allowed to say whether a single joke was funny or go near the edit bay, etc. It’s….not really the way the previous episodes got done. I was what you might call a….hands on producer. Are my….periods giving this enough….pointedness? I’m not saying you can’t make a good version of Community without me, but I am definitely saying that you can’t make my version of it unless I have the option of saying “it has to be like this or I quit” roughly 8 times a day.

There you have. NBC has once again taken something that people love, whether it's Community or Conan O'Brien, and destroyed it in the least classy way possible. No one could even bother to call Harmon to let him know what was going on? No one at NBC has the basic decency to do that?

Our fears have been confirmed — this is the darkest timeline. Community gets to live, but NBC has gutted it of its heart and its brain, handing the show over to mercenary executive producers. Season 4 of Community is going to be Deanelganger of the show's seasons. It'll look like Community and sound like Community, but we'll know it's not really Community. The real Community loved us.

NBC, you're the worst.