Shortly after his return to Community was made officially official, Dan Harmon said that part of his prep for returning to work would be to finally watch the fourth season—first making the prospect sound like an exercise in morbid curiosity and/or self-torture, before more diplomatically promising not to “be a jerk about it” to the writers he’d once worked so closely with. “The worst thing I can do is fart in their direction at all,” Harmon said in his cautiously optimistic youth of 10 days ago—a hopefulness that was slowly eroded, as it was for so many, over the course of 13 episodes, judging by the assessment he gave on this week’s Harmontown podcast:
“I watched season four. I guess I already knew this, but apparently, I’m quite a genius … I think I feel pretty comfortable expressing any kind of 'Eh, not my cup of tea' about it because — this has been expressed a thousand times over — it's obviously not somebody doing what they do and trying very hard to make people happy. It is very much like an impression, and an unflattering one. It’s just 13 episodes of 'Oh, I’m Dan Harmon! Derpy, derpy, durr! Die Hard! Durrrrr!' I feel like I'm going back to work tomorrow morning, and I just feel like, 'Do I talk like that?'…. Man, watching those characters without me there is just not fuckin' cool, man. It's like flipping through Instagrams and watching your girlfriend just blow a million [other guys]”