Look.

I am not saying Dan Harmon’s firing from his own show is right or justified or anything other than stupid and terrible. By all accounts, even his own, he isn’t the easiest person in the world to work with. However, he certainly didn’t deserve such shoddy treatment from a huge corporation that could have avoided all this negative fandom press with a simple phone call. Well, probably not. I’m afraid your press is going to be negative in this case no matter what (the Internet is nothing if not vindictive and prone to fits of rage and fury over much less than the firing of a beloved showrunner), but they wouldn’t have looked like such huge douches if they had at least called the guy before effectively firing him via a  late night, late in the week press release. Stay classy, NBC. 

But I digress. Dan Harmon is a very funny guy and Community is an ambitious, hilarious show, largely due to his level of involvement. But ambitious, hilarious shows are frequently expensive and not accessible to the masses in the ways that terrible, lazy unfunny shows like Two and a Half Men are, which is why they become the targets of nervous, short-sighted, penny-pinching talentless network executives who have screwed up more frequently than they’ve ever succeeded.

Why this type of thing happens so often at NBC is anyone’s guess, but if somebody like Jack Donaghy were to write an insider’s tell-all about how these terrible, ill-informed (and often expensive) decisions about stifling young talent are made, I would buy it and read it voraciously. Instead, I will consume, for free, the vitriolic Internerds posts from Harmon and guys like him. His tumblr reaction post to his firing reads like a more caustic, less polished version of Conan’s parting shot at the network when he learned HE’d been fired from the Tonight Show. The difference is, of course, that the people replacing Harmon are just as funny and creative as he is and perhaps less difficult to deal with, whereas the dude who replaced Conan was Jay Leno. The less said about that skunk-haired turd the better. 

Would that NBC’s soiled hoodie of shame were a time hoodie! Then they could go back to the mid-90s and revel in the success of Seinfeld and Friends and stay there forever in a cocoon of safe “What’s the deal with…” jokes from the master of observational humour while basking in the glow of a thin and tan Chanandler Bong as he gets off another in a long line of “Could I BE any more sarcastic?” quips. But alas, today’s hoodies only have the power to make unarmed teenagers look threatening to pseudo security guards.

Instead, NBC has this weird show where people discover secret garden trampolines, but they’re owned by nazis with swastika tattoos and those same people slowly dress their older, surlier compatriot like the cookie crisp wizard even though nobody really remembers the cookie crisp wizard. I LOVE Community. But it is not an easy show for others to love. 

All that being said, if you read the article linked above, you’ll see this firing a showrunner thing is nothing new. It’s been happening for as long as TV has existed, but until now, we never really had the transparent forum of the Internet in which to express our displeasure about these decisions.

I will say this: I am a bigger fan of later M*A*S*H* episodes than I am of earlier M*A*S*H* episodes. I like B.J. Hunnicut and Sherman T. Potter more than Trapper John and Henry Blake. So sue me. And I really like the writers that are coming to Community from Happy Endings, which is EASILY just as funny and interesting as Community. So I dislike it a whole lot that the vocal part of the Internet fandom has decide to hate something so passionately before they’ve seen it. Because it will probably be very good. 

This is not to say that I don’t hate the situation. I do. I think NBC might just be the stupidest, most short-sighted, old-fashioned network going, and once Parks & Recreation and Community are off the air, I am very likely never going to watch anything they produce ever again. 

But I’m not going to stop watching Community. You’ve got to bend a little, I think. When it returns, it won’t be the same as it was. That’s obvious. But that doesn’t mean it won’t be funny or great or even ambitiously crazy. I suspect it will be stupid good. I like these actors, I love these characters and I want to see where they go next, even if they aren’t crab-walking down a path on the twisted map Dan Harmon was making up as he went. 

We’ll end up in a different place and it might not be as weird as Dan Harmon imagined, but I’m still going to see what happens in the halls of Greendale Community College. If you decide not to take that trip out of spite, I feel sorry for you. Enjoy your spite. I’m sure it’s very funny.