After promising he wouldn’t be a jerk about Community‘s fourth season, the comedy’s once and future showrunner Dan Harmon spoke out on his Harmontown podcast about what he thought of the Harmon-less season. Spoiler alert: He wasn’t too happy with it, and wasn’t afraid to say it with some backhanded and profane responses. He’s since apologized, but the damage’s already been done.
Mostly, Harmon expressed regret that the replacement showrunners David Guarascio and Moses Port tried and, in his opinion, failed to follow his lead. “It’s obviously not somebody doing what they do and trying very hard to make people happy,” he said. “It is very much like an impression, and an unflattering one. It’s just 13 episodes of ‘Oh, I’m Dan Harmon! Huh huuh! Die Hard! Duh huh huh huh!'”
“They could have just done a sitcom set at a community college,” he said, and while he acknowledged that fans would have been disappointed, he thought that “then, five episodes later, regular people would have been like, ‘Oh, this is a pleasant little show set at a community college.'”
One of Harmon’s major regrets was the introduction of Jeff’s dad, who he had always wanted to be played by Bill Murray. He explained that while watching the fourth season, he left Murray an awkward voicemail asking him to be on the show. He followed this up with a bizarre rape metaphor we won’t reproduce here, but sufficed to say it was pretty bad.
Though he was negative about the replacement showrunners, he saved his hardest shots for the company that fired and rehired him. “Writers fighting other writers is the fucking 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.”
He’s since apologized, which you can read in full here, but it pretty much boils down to him saying, “You know what, guys? This one’s on me. My bad.”
(Splitsider via The AV Club, Dan Harmon Poops, image via Rex Hammock)
- Harmon initially promised to not be a jerk
- We were real excited when he confirmed his return to the show
- Sony asked Harmon to return
