Since Dan Harmon confirmed he was returning to Community to executive produce the NBC sitcom he created, he didn’t wait long to take a giant proverbial dump on the entirety of season 4, the one in which he had no involvement. Before he could start imagining the fifth season of the show, he forced himself to sift through the previous season to catch up on what happened during his off-season, a result of him being fired by Sony TV. In his unfiltered podcast called Harmontown he spat out the following:
“It’s very much like an impression and an unflattering one. It’s very much like an impression — an unflattering one. It’s 13 episodes of people doing, ‘Derpy, derpy, der, I’m Dan Harmon, der.’ I’m going back to work tomorrow morning and I’m just like, do I talk like that?”
He compared watching the fourth season to “flipping through Instagram watching your girlfriend blow a million [people].”
He went further: “There’s something awesome about having all of those preconceived notions kind of ripped away from you. It’s exciting. There’s something awesome about being held down and watching your family get raped on a beach. It’s liberating. It makes you focus on what’s important.”
Later: “There’s a system in place that’s winning because I would have had too much leverage, too much power, too much salary as would have a lot of writers coming into Season 4. So they just flushed us, and replaced us with two guys who didn’t know what they were getting into… Writers fighting other writers is the American Dream in the eyes of Sony. That is what they want. They want creative people rewriting each other. They want creative people replacing each other. They want us interchangeable. They want to think about writing the way they think about the guy on assembly line 24 that puts the final screw in the fucking Playstation… I shouldn’t even say ‘they’ because it’s an ‘it,’ it’s a fucking machine. There isn’t a single person that works at that corporation that isn’t also thought of like that by the fucking SkyNet… The system just wants us all to not be human.”
A day after the Harmontown rant, Harmon took to his Tumblr to share a formal apology to those involved with the show and its fans. He tweeted, “I feel bad if I made anyone feel bad with my comments in harmontown. It’s a dirty, personal comedy podcast, not charismatic for quoting. I like making stuff that pleases people, I like being honest about my feelings but I hate hurting other people, especially community fans.” You can read his lengthy apology post here.
With the firing, the rehiring, and the Harmontown rant behind him, hopefully the sorrowful showrunner can now return to making Community great again in its fifth and possibly final season.