Friday night newsbombs are a well-known and favored sneak attack strategy, but Sony Pictures Television outdid themselves this time by announcing Dan Harmon was fired from Community before he even knew about it, though there had been rumblings in the air over the last week. The showrunner and creator’s Tumblr post in response to the situation said:

Why’d Sony want me gone?  I can’t answer that because I’ve been in as much contact with them as you have.  They literally haven’t called me since the season four pickup, so their reasons for replacing me are clearly none of my business.

Finding out you’ve been fired by reading a breaking news item on an entertainment site has to sting, and Harmon came out swinging. He added that despite what Sony might have said about keeping him on as a consultant, he has no real interest in continued involvement with the show, given that:

However, if I actually chose to go to the office, I wouldn’t have any power there.  Nobody would have to do anything I said, ever.  I would be “offering” thoughts on other people’s scripts, not allowed to rewrite them, not allowed to ask anyone else to rewrite them, not allowed to say whether a single joke was funny or go near the edit bay, etc

I can’t really blame him for not wanting to sit on the sidelines while other people have control of his baby; he was gracious enough to note that the new showrunners are good folks, just that he didn’t want to be involved with the show on those terms. Having creative control wrested from you like that, especially in such a humiliating way, is not really an indicator that the network cares intensely about your continued involvement. And that means his role as consultant would be essentially ornamental more than anything else.

Harmon has a reputation for being “hard to work with,” not uncommon for creators. He’s focused and driven and demanding, and always thinks his team can do better. There’s speculation that this working style may be behind his unceremonious ejection from the show, given that networks usually frown on cost overruns and late scripts, both of which Harmon was guilty of at times. Yet, his meticulous approach to handling the show, and his extremely hands-on method, may be what makes Community so adored by fans. The cult hit has a huge following that’s clearly drawn to something and Harmon’s obvious stamp on the work is playing a key role in the reception of the show.

It may not be a ratings king, but Community occupies a special place in the hearts of its viewers. Harmon may be down in this case, but he’s definitely not out for good; he’s got too many ideas bouncing around in his head to throw in the towel just yet and I expect we’re going to see a lot more work from him in the future.

What intrigues me about Harmon’s working style is that it’s more than just the “difficult creator” stereotype.

He’s also on the autism spectrum, as detailed in this interview with Wired last year. His very demanding, orderly, focused approach makes much more sense to me in this context, as does his agitation when his routines are disrupted and he’s forced to deviate from his working style. Harmon isn’t simply unreasonably demanding and difficult because he’s bitten by the creative bug; he’s actually compelled by fundamental differences in the wiring of his brain.

The same differences that undoubtedly contribute to his brilliance as a creator. That’s the thing with being on the spectrum. You can’t separate out the autistic and non-autistic parts of yourself into neat categories. You get a complete package, and that means you develop fixations and obsessions right along with the creative leaps that make your work stand out as quirky, experimental, and unusual. Harmon’s work isn’t typical because he’s not typical, and taking him off the team at Community could be a profound error if the network has any interest in continuing to keep the show going.

What he brings to the show can’t be replaced with just any showrunner, because Harmon’s got something unique he’s bringing to the table.

Harmon’s story intrigues me because he’s one of the very few people in Hollywood openly discussing disability and identifying with it. The representation of people with disabilities in Hollywood—as actors, creators, producers, showrunners, or anything else—is absolutely abysmal. The inclusion of people with disabilities in the writing room is especially important because that’s what results in better representation on the screen. When people actually living the experience are writing it, it shows; it shows with Abed, for example, with whom Harmon identifies in many ways.

By dismissing Harmon from the show in an incredibly abrasive and abrupt way—one bound to upset anyone but especially someone on the spectrum who enjoys order and control in his life—the network did more than say that it didn’t want Harmon involved with the show anymore. It also sent a signal to other disabled producers and creatives, a warning that if they don’t play nicely, they, too could be checking their phones after a flight and finding out they’re fired.

This post contains spoilers through the May 10 episode of Community.

I should start this off by saying how pleased I am by Community‘s renewal, even at thirteen episodes rather than a full season. It’s really nice to see this wonderful, experimental little show that’s been so marvelously dedicated to exploring the boundaries of television’s forms get a chance to go out at a logical time for the world in which it’s set, as its characters get the degrees they came to Greendale to get and head out into the world. Though now that we’ve achieved this and are one year closer to six seasons and a movie, I think it’s time to set a new impossible dream: a season of Community set in all the remaining timelines.

As for the episode itself, this was more clip show than anything else, but I think it got at an important point that the show doesn’t always address head-on: what if landing at Greendale hasn’t been great for all of these characters? Of course, their shrink is lying in Chang’s service when he tells the now-former study group that “There is a place called Greendale, and you all spent three years there, but it’s not a community college.” But as we journey through it, the show kind of suggests that their time there has been neither educational nor salutary. There are classes in advanced breathing and the ability to fry things. Parking spots are determined by chess matches with human pieces. Abed may be going through the early experimental period of his filmmaking career, and the Dean may be getting his jollies, but making movies with him isn’t exactly what everyone else came to school to do. “If you’d gone to school there, you’d be obsessed with it too,” Jeff explains. And oh, we are. But that’s not the same thing as it being what all of them needed or intended.

And now that we get one more season, I’ll be curious to see if and how Community sets up these people to go out into the world. Will Troy go to air conditioning repair school? Will Jeff actually get his law degree back? Will Shirley open her business? What about Annie? And what experiments are yet to come? As Garett put it, “I want to see what happens if we confiscate one of their pens.” So do I, Gareth. So do I.

In tonight’s finale of Parks & Recreation, we’ll find out if Leslie Knope won or lost the City Council seat she’s been campaigning for all season, but it’s still not clear if we’ll return to Pawnee next season to see Leslie take her place alongside Councilman Hauser in victory or revitalize the Parks Department in defeat. The same is true for Greendale Community College and the TGS writers’ room at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. The speculation is that 30 Rock will be back for a short season, and that if Parks & Rec and Community get pickups, they’ll be shorter orders as well. That might mean fewer episodes of shows we love. But creatively, it strikes me as a good thing.

I’m a long-time advocate of shorter seasons, and I think we’ve seen a lot of illustrations of the foibles of trying to fit 22-episode orders into a 40-week period this year. Revenge‘s long hiatus slowed the momentum of the ABC Hamptons-set thriller down to a crawl, and the show’s gotten baroque and full of moody shots in its attempt to fill up episode space since its return. Community‘s disappearance from NBC’s airwaves for an agonizing and indefinite period left fans waiting, and while NBC tossed out and then yanked sitcoms like Best Friends Forever and Bent in quick succession. Now I understand that shows fail, networks need to replace things that aren’t working at all, and fans don’t want to wait a long time for their favorite shows to come back. But I’d much rather see short, excellent seasons of shows that are suited to it, and to see them run continuously rather than spaced out in seemingly random ways.

NBC’s Thursday night comedies seem uniquely suited to shorter, smarter seasons. 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation‘s shortened seasons were their best for entirely different reasons. 30 Rock‘s second season was shortened by the writers’ strike, but it was a hilarious, joke-dense season. “SeinfeldVision” and “MILF Island” were fantastic riffs on the industry that preceded the “Queen of Jordan” running gag the show is using now. “Greenzo” featured two of the show’s best-ever cameos in David Schwimmer and Al Gore. And “Sandwich Day” turned Liz’s love of food into a sign of something other than middle-aged singleton schlubbiness. No one has ever made scarfing a sub look so poignant before or since.

Parks and Recreation‘s shortened third season had tons of great comedic beats as well, but it also illustrated how sitcoms can pull off strong serialization without dropping plotlines for a long stretch of episodes or producing episodes that don’t work as standalones. The stated major arc of the season was the question of whether Ben and Leslie would get together, a will-they-or-won’t-they that fit neatly into a wide variety of settings. And it turned out that Leslie’s victories in restoring the Harvest Festival, over her rivals in Eagleton, and in organizing Lil’ Sebastian’s funeral were actually setting up Leslie being asked to run for office. The show didn’t always hit the same beats, and in fact in episodes like “April and Andy’s Fancy Party” and “The Fight,” we got to see a number of the vulnerabilities that would plague Leslie in her campaign this season, namely her desire for control.

The 22-odd episode season may be an industry convention, but that doesn’t mean it’s a creative imperative. If the 2012-2013 season is going to be the last year we have 30 Rock, Parks & Recreation and Community, I’d rather have one of those shows on every night for 36 to 45 straight weeks (with exceptions for holidays), and to have those episodes be uniformly excellent, no filler. And if television’s really just about selling soap, I’ve got to believe it might sell better with new programming rather than reruns and schedule gaps.

This post contains spoilers through the May 3 episode of Community.

One of the reasons I tend to prefer Community’s rarer emotionally precise episodes to its high-concept episodes is that while I trust that the show cares deeply about the characters, when it takes on cultural forms, the show usually has more to say about the forms themselves than the ideas that animate and give life to them. Last week’s Law & Order episode, for example, touched on the power that we give the cops, but it’s more about replicating the fact that pop culture cops hit things in interrogation rooms than in exploring what it means that they do. In addition to feeling weirdly rushed and formless, this week’s episode had elements of that same issue when it came to Chang’s takeover.

When Dean Pelton’s initially running through Chang’s list of requests for the security squad, it’s a quick runthrough of the War on Terror: “Cool new uniforms, like that. Power to enact martial law, not so much Indefinite detention. pepper spray. Involuntary cavity searches. No soft serve?…I’m sorry, Chang, this stuff is too extreme. This is a community college, not an inner city high school.” It’s kind of funny, but it’s mostly the same old flip joke about Dean Pelton missing what’s important and Chang being self-important. Same with Jeff’s declaration at Starburns’ funeral that he’s achieved “Acceptance that this place, this Fallujah of higher learning, is a prison from which none of us will ever escape.” It’s the same sort of overreaching statement he always makes (though this one is an unattractive comparison), only this time the conclusion is bitter rather than superficially uplifting.

The thing is, there is an interesting story to be told about small men who amass great power in secret, like the ones who actually implemented some of the things Chang wants Dean Pelton to give him power to do. Hopefully this rushed setup will give later episodes some time to deal with Chang’s psyche in particular and how what these power grabs mean in a real way. Chang’s not wrong when he complains that “That’s the problem with you civilian suits. You want results, but you don’t want to see how the sausage gets made.” And Dean Pelton’s not the only man to sign papers wile saying “Just promise me you’ll use restraint.” Better get that part of things in writing.

I was at a screening of The Avengers* last night and up late talking about it with some of my colleagues about it after, so shorter thoughts about this than usual. But I thought this episode of Community, a Law & Order parody, did a really nice job of exposing the ridiculous things we let people get away with when they have badges or the power of the district attorney’s office behind them. It’s not like readers of this blog don’t know that I find it disturbing that our cop shows tend to legitimize a certain amount of police brutality when it’s performed by cops we’re supposed to be emotionally invested in. But it’s still really funny to see Troy rage around an interrogation room, insisting “You don’t order ketchup! It’s a condiment!” And it was a treat to see Leslie Hendrix, who played Law & Order medical examiner Elizabeth Rodgers for years pop up to explain “This level of smashing is consistent with someone stepping on the yam after it was dropped” in the same deadpan TV doctors use to give the impression that crime-solving science is precise and unbeatable.

Crime TV may strive for certain kinds of nuance, but it’s always very invested in conveying how powerful the police are. And goodness knows that’s justified—the state hands the police a lot of power, and protects them when they use that. But approaching the police with respect and caution doesn’t mean we can’t look at the power we give them ourselves, and the ridiculous things we dignify. Laughter at the latter is a good place to start.

*Three-word review: it is awesome. More details to come.

This post contains spoilers through the April 19 episode of Community.

Over the years I’ve been watching Community, I’ve written a great deal on and off about Dean Pelton. Often, it’s been about the way the show’s handled his sexual orientation in the absence of another gay character. But there’s an extent to which I think, if Abed Nadir is Dan Harmon’s stand-in on the show, Dean Pelton represents Community itself with the study group as audience proxy. Pelton is the clearest articulation of the show’s desire to be weird, and to be happy in that weirdness, whether it’s embracing a Dalmation fetish or splitting the show into six different timelines. But Pelton isn’t a happy, untroubled freak—he’s a freak who both wants to let his flag fly and is in a constant state of anxiety about how it will go over with the people he wants to impress. And when he tells the study group “Can I be perfectly honest with you guys? I think I went too far with this one. I have to go to the bank today. What am I supposed to tell people in line?” and then tells himself “Come on, Craig. Get your life together,” it’s the perfect prelude to Community’s most conceptually and emotionally ambitious episode in quite some time.

I like Community’s high-concept stuff, but ultimately, the show’s emotional capacity is more important to me than its experimental riffing. It’s why “Mixology Certification” remains my favorite episode of the show: it took a deeply normal concept, let all the characters bring their own type of weird to the proceedings, and reaped enormous emotional rewards, from Pierce’s self-destructive cussed independence, to Shirley’s past as a drunk, to Abed’s confrontation with a social world that’s less forgiving of his foibles. Tonight’s episode was much more narrowly focused than “Mixology Certification” was. But putting together Community‘s most-empathetic character and its least-empathetic ended up reaping considerable payoff for the most serial storyline the show’s done, Abed’s ongoing confrontation with the fact that his way of seeing the world may make it special, but it also doesn’t make him a very nice person.

The episode really kicked into gear when Abed tries to explain how the Dreamatorium works, and ends up insulting Annie. You see it that way because it’s calibrated to a specific level of brain function,” he tells the girl who’s volunteered to play with him so Troy and Britta can go on a date. “Not stupid, just less able to see what I see.” In response, Annie jams the works, spitting out “We lower-functioning brains call this empathy.” What follows doesn’t resolve anything—it’s not clear if Britta and Troy did or are going to get together, Annie may not know what’s going to happen between her and Jeff next, and who knows if Troy’s going to air conditioning repair school—but we do know more about how Abed sees the group he’s terrified of losing.

He assumes that Annie wants to be overwhelmed by Jeff, imagining that she’ll like it if he, as Jeff, tells her: “Make love to me, Annie. I know I’m just a surgeon, and you’re a hotshot upstart administrator. But damn the rules. Damn the system. Damn our two-foot height disparity. I want you.” And Abed sees Britta and Troy as a joyless couple, who tell him things like “We just saved an uninsured homeless man’s life,” “Using an unapproved procedure. Now we’re going to kiss.” (Troy’s confession that “I’m more turned on by women in pajamas and lingere. I just want to know they feel comfortable,” is, however, unintentionally the best ever.) Leonard is a cable-less peeper. Abed’s terrified that Annie truly does see him as a “Control freak with no empathy. People bend over backward to help him.” And he’s terrified to admit to anyone how he really sees himself. It’s deeply poignant when he tells Annie “I don’t get married. I don’t invent a billion-dollar website that helps people have sex. I don’t make it into Sundance, SlamDance, or DancePants. Troy invents DancePants in 2019, but don’t tell him. He has to stumble onto it.”

If Abed’s stuck categorizing the world, Annie, at least, is able to confess that she has the opposite problem: trying to bend the world to meet her needs. “We’re just in love with the idea of being loved. And if we can teach a guy like Jeff to do it, we’ll never be unloved,” Annie tells Abed. “We both need to get more comfortable wining it.” And after several episodes of Abed asking for clarification on what to feel, or whether something is a social cue, he finally gets it right. “I’m hungry,” he says, asking Annie “Are you hungry? I’ll make us buttered noodles.” It’s a small foundation for redemption. But sometimes, you wear your Duala-Dean outfit to the bank and end up out to lunch. For Community‘s often-stunted characters, life’s all about taking enormous risks for potentially small emotional payoffs. The show takes huge creative risks for small ratings payoffs, but the emotional gifts, when it gets things right, are enormous.

This post contains spoilers through the April 12 episode of Community.

There’s something sort of fitting that as Dan Harmon and Chevy Chase’s feud becomes the thing that keeps Community in the news in a way it never was before, the show gave Chase some of the sweetest scenes he’s ever gotten. This was a decidedly minor episode of Community, one without a major schtick or even really a signature joke. But it was a reminder that Community, in addition to being a wildly inventive experiment, can also function as an entirely solid conventional sitcom.

To take the Pierce story first, even though it was the C plot, I thought this episode did a nice job of teasing out that Pierce is essentially responsible for his own isolation, and that he’s aware of that and regrets it. “How come I’m not best friends with everyone in the group?” he asks mournfully, then snaps “Don’t patronize me,” when Annie and Shirley coo sympathetically. Then, when he muffs his moment of bonding with Shirley, we see him regret it, sighing “I was one of the gang. It was in my hand.” So, as he has before, Pierce goes outside the group, wooing Chang with blue stuffed ponies, cotton candy, and the kind of mild deafness that means he overlooks Chang’s suggestion that they play Russian Roulette. But at the end, even Chang leaves him, and Pierce is left holding the stuffed pony, wondering why he’s alone. Pierce is with the group because they’ll the people who have him, and to a certain extent, maybe that’s where Chase is with Community: like it or not, it’s the show that would have him, and while it can be tough on him, it’s given him more meaningful material than many comparable shows would.

In the main story, Annie, Troy, and Abed team up to keep Britta from going back to Blade, her carnie boyfriend who is “named after a kickboxing vampire movie”—or as Troy puts it, accurately, “a fantastic kickboxing vampire movie.” It’s been a while since Community’s done much with the fact that Annie is a recovering addict, and it’s very funny to listen to her hear Britta explain that “Left unattended, I will end up doing him like a crossword,” and beg Annie to “Handcuff me to the radiator like a motherflipping carnie-banging werewolf,” and take up the challenge, using her experience to help her friend. Her Lying Junkie Banana was a fantastic lo-fi joke.

And I’m glad to see the show keeping alive Dean Laybourne’s attempts to get Troy to join the air conditioning repair school, or what Dean Pelton calls “a wonderful opportunity for a young man of an urban race.” Laybourne’s decision to put the task on Pelton was very funny. “Natalie, could you get me a book on how to do things?” Dean Pelton asked. “Nevermind. Make me a scotch and soda.” “Do it yourself!” she snapped, only to be left by his wail of “I don’t know how!” And I love that the solution he came up with was crashing Troy and Abed’s Blade-viewing party in his pajamas. At the end of the day, he’s even more of an outsider than Pierce is. “Hi Dean! Why are you here?” Britta says on emerging from Annie’s bedroom. “Hi Britta!” the Dean says back to her. “And ouch!”

The bridge is yours.

-Ben Kingsley will be the villain in Iron Man 3. It’s a great time to be a British actor who wants to break into superhero and sci-fi franchises as a baddie.

-Adam McKay, bless him, is starting to give us Anchorman 2 details.

-The average American household is now paying $86 a month for cable.

-Chevy Chase: still angry, still with the voicemails.

-F. Gary Gray may give us an NWA biopic.

-Everything I’ve seen about Brave just makes me more excited for it:

This post contains spoilers through the April 5 episode of Community.

There’s a way in which “Pillows and Blankets” is the platonic ideal of a Community episode: it’s the ultimate example fans of the show can pull out to explain why they love it, and critics will use to demonstrate why the show is obsessed with concepts and detached from actual emotion. The show is a funny facsimile of war movies, a brilliant breakdown of the elements involved in the trope, but one that has precisely nothing to say about how we actually ought to tell stories about war, or what it means to be in combat or conflict.

I’ll admit to a certain amount of squeamishness about reducing the Civil War, the conflict to which this is the most obvious analogue, to a pillow fight, or to the suggestion, as Jeff put it, that “Some conflicts are so pointless they just have to play themselves out.” And while this assessment depends heavily on what comes after, I thought this was a remarkably facile means of dealing with the really profound issues that plague Troy and Abed’s friendship. Recognizing that you enjoying spending time together isn’t actually enough to mend the fact that you have significantly different worldviews, goals, and standards for treating people.

The recitations of war cliches aren’t bad. “There was a point where all I saw were feathers. And I started swinging. And I hit someone. And hear someone fall. It might have been someone from my side,” Shirley admits. Herry Jefferson, who we’ve never met before, talks about the camaraderie of war, explaining that “New Fluffytown didn’t care who you were. You were surrounded by softness.” Jeff’s platitudinous speeches mean he’s well-prepared to deliver lines like “We fight not because we want war. We fight because we might gain peace.”

But the fact that these forms are cliches doesn’t mean they aren’t meaningful, or that they don’t exist for a reason. Saying things like “The Rambo titles never made sense. And neither does war,” is cute, but it’s a statement doesn’t even remotely stand up to scrutiny. The episode does the same thing Jeff does at the end while writing in his diary, takes a potentially authentic moment and turns it into pure performance. At its best, as in “Introduction to Mixology,” Community’s capable of being wildly performative and achingly meaningful. This episode doesn’t live up to that standard.

While Community and Parks and Recreation are gems on their own, one of the things that makes me happiest about the continued existence of both shows is that they’re training and credentialing a generation of writers on a particular kind of smart comedy. Parks and Recreation is bringing optimism about government, women in escalating positions of leadership, and feminist manly men into the television ecosystem, while Community is uniting high and low art nerddom and clever racial and gender-based humor.

And some of these writers are starting to get their own stand-alone projects. Katie Dippold, who wrote some of the best episodes of Parks and Recreation including “Fancy Party,” in which April and Andy get married, and “Indianapolis,” in which Ron Swanson pursues the perfect steak, just sold a movie about two female cops. I’m particularly excited for this project, given both that we’re allowed to have two male cops as partners, but women always have to be paired up with men, and that the idea of anyone from Parks and Rec tackling any part of government bureaucracy is inherently thrilling to me. Then, Community‘s Hilary Winston has a pilot about a woman who tries to pull her life together after a brutal dumping in development for the fall at NBC. For those of us who always enjoy it when Community‘s women step into the center of the frame, or out on their own, that’s delightful news. And Community and Happy Endings directors Anthony and Joseph Russo are, amazingly, in the running to direct the Captain America sequel.

This is the thing to remember for those of us who freak out about the potential for cancellation of either of these gems. It would be a tragedy to lose Parks and Recreation or Community at this point in their runs. But the prospect of unlocking the talent from these writers’ rooms and applying them to other projects, too, should be an exciting one.