Community, NBC's cult-hit comedy, has seen some major shake-ups this season, despite being only four episodes in. The gang returned to Greendale Community College after a two years away, Chevy Chase's character, Pierce Hawthorn was killed off and, his last act was to leave Donald Glover's character, Troy Barnes, the remaining shares of his company, worth millions of dollars. Thursday's episode will be Glover's last on the series as he has decided to leave the show and pursue other ventures. The man at the helm of all this change is the recently reinstated creator of the series, Dan Harmon, who recently sat down for an interview in which he discussed the many changes.
"The truth is, I just don't think it was ever in the cards for Chevy to make a return to the show," Harmon said in an interview with IGN regarding the decision to kill off Pierce Hawthrone. "So if you have a character that's not longer on the show and was the old fella of the group, It's a handy narrative device... Because Chevy will be missed on that screen and the character was Chevy at his best, in my very humble opinion. So it was nice to be able to have that character still affecting things from beyond, because Chevy did leave such a vacuum. So to acknowledge that Pierce Hawthorne left a vacuum and that he's still affecting them from beyond, we thought was an interesting thing. I don't know, there was no real strategy to killing off his character. It just felt like a good way to tell some grounded stories and to sort of symbolically combine the departure of Troy with the departure of the other guy that left. It felt poetic to us."
Chase's departure from the show was the result of a highly publicized frustration with the direction of the sitcom as well as some bad blood between the actor and Harmon himself. In the end, Chase walked off set and was written out of the last two episodes of season four.
As for the departure of Troy, Harmon was willing to open up about that as well, prior to his final episode.
"We wanted to make sure we did it in typical Community fashion and give Troy and Abed some fun stuff to do. We didn't want to just spend 20 minutes crying and hugging goodbye. We make it a point of the story that the saddest thing about Troy leaving is how much fun Troy and Abed were together and how that feels like a terrifying thing to have to walk away from. We actually make that part of the story, that they have a tendency to be in denial about facing these things when they happen," he said. "So it becomes one of our bigger fun episodes. But then, toward the end of it, it uncontrollably turns into a three-box-of-Kleenex tearjerker. There was no way around that. At a certain point, Troy has to say goodbye to Abed. I watched that part in the director's cut, and there's just no getting around crying if you're at all a fan of the show at that moment. But we make a meal out of those tears. We put 'em in a sandwich and serve 'em up. We put a little American flag on a toothpick on top."
Donald Glover's final episode premiers Thursday at 8/7c on NBC. For more of IGN's interview with Harmon, you can find it HERE.
