Dan Harmon speaks on “Community” cancellation

After arguably devastating news on Friday afternoon that Community had been officially cancelled, creator/showrunner Dan Harmon was in Portland recording an episode of his Harmontown podcast at Bridgetown Comedy Festvial. We can only assume the news dropped when it did to make his show the hottest ticket in town and we were there to get the news first hand.

During the taping, Jeff Davis accused Dan of being drunk since breakfast. Dan quickly explained, “I was hungover, we all know what happened yesterday.” They spent an obscene amount of time talking stripclubs and bar fights before Jeff brought up the obvious, “Your show got cancelled yesterday!”

Jeff told the story of being picked up from the airport. Once in the car, the driver mentioned having to pick up Dan later in the day and asked if he knew his show got cancelled. Shocked, Jeff said, “I didn’t know that, when did that news drop?” The answer was, recently and there was a chance that Dan was in the air when that news blew up on Twitter. Not the case, he explained, “I was on my way to LAX and somebody from Sony called me.”

He laughed before continuing. “The fans of that show have more reason to be upset than I do. I can go try to create another show. Also, I got paid for every minute I cared about that show. The people who are most devastated are the ones that put unpaid labor into the show. Like, ‘I’m hashtagging this, I’m gonna get this tattooed. I love this show.’ They didn’t get compensated for it.”

Jeff continued to probe, “Your feelings aside, and also you can’t really relate to the hardcore fan who loves Community, that is the end of the show. That means a lot to people, it clearly means a lot to you. Now that that’s done, how do you feel?”

“It’ll take weeks to sink in.”

So take comfort in knowing that it’s not just you. You can hear the rest of the podcast episode now as it was just posted.