That Time Dan Harmon Broke Up With Community

Most shows just end. They get cancelled. They finish their story. But not Community. Community rolled over one morning and realised that while it loved us, it just needed to move on. It wasn’t looking for anyone else, we just weren’t the one. But it was up to Dan Harmon, the creator, to break things off in the end, because Community couldn’t let go of such a great thing.

Community is a sitcom about a group of community college students who form a study group, led by fraudelent lawyer Jeff Winger. It’s one of my favourite shows of all time, maybe my favourite show ever. Sorry Mad Men. Which is not to say it isn’t flawed. My relationship with Community is exactly that. Like any good relationship it has challenges, difficult periods, and has even done certain things I would have thought to be unforgivable. But through that we’ve negotiated something meaningful.

Dan Harmon is the mind behind Community, a man intensely interested in reinventing the sitcom in as many genres and locations and possible. Harmon’s continued this thread in Rick and Morty, and will probably do it forever.

But Community is the most honest exploration of this desire. Whether episodes are post-modern homages to Star Wars by way of paintball or hyper dense critiques of CSI, almost every episode is built on a referencial conceit. This is part of what…