When Dan Harmon announced last week that Sony had approached him about doing the DVD commentary track for Season 4 of Community, I laid out two possibilities. The first was that he’d bite his tongue a little and try to be diplomatic about the season of the show that was produced after he’d been fired and replaced. The other was that he’d go on a full-on scorched earth, take no prisoners rampage and lay waste to everything in his path and within flamethrower range of his path. Well, it appears he’s chosen the former, as he explained to E! News:
“I am going to watch it I think when I get back on Sunday. I’m just going to sit by myself, pop some popcorn and watch it,” he says. “I’m not going to be a jerk about it. I know there were some great writers working on that show who bled with me for seasons one, two and three…the worst thing I can do is fart in their direction at all.”
“At the same time, I’m going to look at this thing and I don’t think it would be very Community of me to negate anything,” he continues. “Season three was weird, season two was weird, season one was weird; they’re all weird. So if season four was weird in a different way, season’s five job is to reveal that all four of those weird things add up to some weird hip-hop dance that when you put it on a loop, you go, ‘Oh, I get it!'”
This seems like the right tone to take here. Running a show seems very hard and stressful, and trying to do it while waging war with history probably just adds to that. Don’t get me wrong, it would have been fun to watch Dan Harmon run around kicking over people’s sandcastles, at least for a little while. But it probably would have hurt the show. Better to take what you got and work with it without torching every bridge in Greendale, I suppose. To quote one of the 20th century’s most respected philosophers “I guess this is growing up.”
