I haven’t sat down and watched a solid two hour block of shows in a long time. I like those first three shows a lot but all through Netflix. I’ve never seen an episode of Community.
Oh man, do yourself a favor and check out Community. It’s on Hulu currently.
The first three seasons are gold, season 4 (when the showrunner got fired) is generally considered poor but isn’t that awful, and seasons 5 and 6 (when the showrunner was rehired and then when the show moved from NBC to Yahoo Screen) are divisive for some, but I liked them a lot.
How’d that happen? Why was he fired, then rehired?
Fired because he’s kind of an asshole, had multiple conflicts with Chevy Chase, and has problems with deadlines to the point where episodes were regularly being filmed without 100% completed scripts. (Any Rick and Morty fan will understand Dan Harmon’s problems getting shit written in a timely manner, and Community was a broadcast network show, not cable.)
Rehired because on the whole he’s a great writer and the show was more personal than I think most people realized at the time and suffered quite a bit from his absence (it’s been said that there wasn’t a single page of any script by any writer on the show written while he was in charge that he didn’t personally revise). More importantly, the fans heavily campaigned for his return, some of the cast (Joel McHale in particular) threatened to walk if he wasn’t brought back, and Chevy Chase had already decided to leave anyway before anyone seriously considered bringing Dan back.
A lot of that is a simplification, but it’s the gist of it.