Advanced Introduction to Finality

Bring Back Dan? Yes, please.
I watched the last episode of Community and sensed something was definitely "off". Then I read these reviews and discovered NBC had gotten rid of Dan Harmon. What a shame; Community was just taking off. People were just discovering this brilliant original show and its talented cast. I still love the cast, but the actors can't shine the way they did. It's still a nice show, but it's not the Community it was under Harmon. I hope it gets better.

They're trying too hard
Without Dan Harmon at the helm, a lot of fans worried that the show would deteriorate into the tired old sitcom tropes that the new showrunners have been a party to in the past on their less-unconventional series.

That hasn't happened--but what has happened has got me wondering if maybe taking a more conventional approach would have been a way to revitalize Community. Rather than go their own way, the new team have done their best to replicate Harmon's madcap energy and it just feels...not quite right. It's like when Aykroyd and John Goodman tried to recapture the magic of "The Blues Brothers." That movie was, objectively, pretty funny but as you watched it, it just FELT terrible.

That's how it is here; in their attempts to maintain continuity with the Community of old, the new guys are failing to do the thing they're MOST responsible for: Making the best show they can make with the talent and resources at hand.

Not Community at it's best, but still Community
The lack of creator Dan Harmon shows in every moment of season 4. It's hard to quantify really, but the mistakes this season makes are the same so many fan fiction writers make. The writing doesn't have the same grasp of the themes of the show and lacks the grounding that makes the show so great. In the commentaries on the previous season DVDs, Harmon repeatedly points out that they write the outline for what story they want to tell, and then work out the jokes and cute meta twists they'll take on after. Season 4 seemed to focus on the fan service first, then wrote stories around that.
All that said, Community features the best cast of comedians on television. Between the cast and supporting cast, a writer would have to go out of their way to come up with a script that would not be funny in their hands. If you take comparisons to other seasons out of your evaluation, season 4 remains one of the funniest sitcoms out there. I am however extremely excited that Dan Harmon will be...

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