the show will be fine without him, a lot of people are freaking out but I think Community has enough talented writers/directors that losing Dan Harmon won't be that catastrophic.

Best case scenario: "Dead Like Me" post-Bryan Fuller. Still very, very, very good, but never reaches "great" (yes, regardless of Fuller leaving extremely early in the show's run)

Most likely case scenario: "Monty Python" post-John Cleese. This is the end of the show, but it will be decent and watchable. However, it will contain nobody's favorite episode and will be just be those episodes we barely watch on the box set. The show dies young and is remembered fondly regardless of whatever happened. Also, this opens up the possibility of that movie

Worst case scenario: "Scrubs" Season 9. What are you talking about? There was no fourth season.

Darkest Timeline: "The Office" post-everyone's sanity. It's awful, the cast clearly doesn't want to be there, and NBC mocks us by keeping the show on, and turns it into an embarrassing zombie.

Why do none of your scenarios involve it continuing to be just as good as it has been, which, while perhaps unlikely, is certainly entirely within the realm of possibilities worth considering?

Because that's the timeline where Abed grabs the dice.

Also, Dan Harmon was really involved in nearly every process in the show, and every time a showrunner leaves a show they run like that, it's never a good thing.

They're all leaving too (some were already and others have quit since the Harmon announcement, possibly in solidarity). The key sign here is that they brought in outside showrunners rather than promote Chris McKenna (the only S1 holdover, who is quitting) or Megan Ganz (the only S2 holdover left who even might return). Make no mistake, this is a complete staff turnover in pursuit of a complete tonal and stylistic shift.

I'd say best-case is the show becomes a still-funny but much blander straightforward sitcom (i.e. like the show was in early s1, or like the new showrunners' work on Happy Endings) and worst-case is an attempt to replicate Harmon and the more eccentric and risky things the show's done, which will almost certainly fail. I'd much rather see the show retreat to normalcy than descend into wackiness. Sony almost certainly wants the show to go on and maybe even find a bigger audience - otherwise, why bother firing Harmon instead of letting him play out the string in season 3.5? - so my guess is they'll have the new showrunners on a tight leash and the "best case" is more likely than not. I can see a more limited, conventional version of Community being depicted onscreen as the characters growing up and taming themselves a bit, which is a fine way to go with it and for all I know could have been where Harmon would have taken the show eventually. But it will miss his voice and his vision and those of the other departing writers. I quite honestly felt that in S2 it was the best show on television, that in S3 it was still TV's best sitcom - it won't ever be that again.

The show I've loved for three years has essentially finished. At the very least the season-ending episodes were written with this outcome in mind and provided a fitting resolution.

http://channel101.wikia.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Super_Basic_Shit









Chance this has all been orchestrated by Harmon in an attempt to live out his own Hero's Journey while trying to craft the greatest metacomedic story ever told: 8%

That's really cool stuff, monga.

Yeah, Thursday kind of felt like the end of something. The show will keep going for a bit, but I don't think it can reach the Olympian heights that it has in the past. It makes me sad, but more in a "my kids are moving out and entering the real world" parent feeling which I haven't experienced (but you get the idea) rather than a "someone just died" sadness.

I don't know how I feel about a movie, though. What would it involve? Graduation? Another "save Greendale" theme? idk

They fired Dan Harmon? Are you fucking kidding me? This supposed TV renaissance is the most overrated thing I've ever seen. I don't know why I even waste my time anymore. Indie, arthouse, and foreign cinema for life.

Watched those last 3 episodes last night. Just incredible, not much more to say. I'm sure there's a good chance that next season will be decent, but I'm pretty comfortable keeping the mindset that Community as we know it is over.

71 episodes
x 22 minutes
= 26 hours of content
= 13 movies

So your interpretation is one way of looking at it but another is that in three years Dan Harmon gave us a whole arthouse director's career's worth of (fucking unbelievably great) material.

Not to mention that you didn't even have to buy one ticket, let alone 13, in order to see it.

Blame the business of network television, not television in general. This would never happen to people like Matthew Weiner or Vince Gilligan.

Plus, network television is having the opposite of a renaissance. Most of the good shows are on cable. I don't even watch any really good dramas on network TV and Community is probably one of only a handful of really good network TV comedies and it was also by far the best through each of the last three seasons (although Parks S3 gave Community S2 a good run for its money).

^ It almost did happen to Matthew Weiner

That was a very different fight, though - I really doubt it was ever a matter of AMC being willing to do the show without Weiner. They just wanted to push him on the show's budget and commercial time. Whereas Community has clearly been a matter of Harmon being a) very bad at the management side of his job and b) unwilling to compromise creatively, and thus Sony being not just willing but eager to get rid of him.

They must have very actively resented him since like 5 people watch Community and it's going to be cancelled anyway. A kick on the way out making it clear he's never working there again.

Community is actually an incredibly popular and well acclaimed show, it's just that nobody watches the shows as it airs live. I remember reading a comment Joel McHale made about how he asked an audience of 40 college students if they watched his show Community and they they all raised their hands, but only a couple students raised their hands when he asked if they watched it on Thursday nights. All of the students said that they watch it online. Nielsan ratings are an outdated means of measuring a shows popularity.