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After joining Screen Rant in January 2025, Guy became a Senior Features Writer in March of the same year, and now specializes in features about classic TV shows. With several years' experience writing for and editing TV, film and music publications, his areas of expertise include a wide range of genres, from comedies, animated series, and crime dramas, to Westerns and political thrillers.
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In 2009, the NBC sitcom Community came straight out of left field to revive Chevy Chase’s career as an iconic comedy actor. Just as unexpected as Chase’s winning turn as Pierce Hawthorne, however, was his sudden exit from the show, midway through season 4.
Chase’s new biographical documentary movie I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not suggests that the sitcom’s creator and showrunner Dan Harmon incited the incident that caused his departure. Generally regarded as one of Harmon’s best TV shows, Community was fundamentally his baby, and he inevitably clashed with Chevy Chase when the actor expressed an unwillingness to toe the line on set.
Nevertheless, Community brought Chase acclaim and recognition from a whole new generation, decades after his success with the Vacation movies. His apparent creative differences with Harmon weren’t enough to force him off the show, even after the showrunner insulted the actor in front of his family at its season 3 wrap party.
It was an incident midway through the production of season 4 that sparked Chevy Chase’s exit from Community. When a run-in with fellow cast member Yvette Nicole Brown was leaked to the media, things escalated between Chase and NBC, and he swiftly departed six episodes into a 13-episode season.
I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not suggests that it was Dan Harmon who sparked off this incident with something he wrote for the Community episode "Advanced Documentary Filmmaking". During Chase’s documentary, the director of the episode, Jay Chandrasekhar, appears to recall, “Harmon writes this, a blackface hand-puppet routine…”
It was this routine that instigated the problems between Chase and Yvette Nicole Brown that resulted in him leaving the show. In this way, I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not appears to lay a big part of the blame at Harmon’s door for what happened.
In fact, Dan Harmon wasn’t anywhere near the set or the writing room for any of Community season 4, which is widely seen as a key reason for its shortcomings. Harmon was unceremoniously fired from working on his show by NBC, over six months before the incident which forced Chase out of the sitcom.
Community’s creator had absolutely no part in writing "Advanced Documentary Filmmaking" – which was scripted by It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia and My Name Is Earl writer Hunter Covington – or any other episode in season 4. By the time he was rehired to run Community season 5, Chevy Chase was long gone.
It’s also highly questionable whether Jay Chandrasekhar actually did claim that Dan Harmon wrote the blackface hand-puppet routine in "Advanced Documentary Filmmaking". I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not seems to have spliced together a voiceover of Chandrasekhar mentioning Harmon’s name with footage of him talking about the routine in question.
This problematic piece of editing makes the viewer think he’s accusing Harmon of writing the offending part of the episode, completely rewriting the narrative of what happened. Whether intentionally or not, the documentary incorrectly has us believe that Harmon effectively caused Chase to lose his job.
Chevy Chase may have had his run-ins with Dan Harmon, but Community’s creator had nothing to do with him leaving the show. Instead, it was a clash that Chase describes as provoked by a misunderstanding during that fateful season 4 episode.
This supposed misunderstanding was related to the blackface hand-puppet routine which Jay Chandrasekhar describes, although that was just the beginning of the problem. Chase was upset that his character was being made out to be racist. In venting his frustration, he used the N-word as an example of what Pierce might be asked to say next.
Chandrasekhar recalls that Yvette Nicole Brown was offended by Chase using the N-word, and stormed off set when he attempted to justify it. What happened subsequently got out to the press, and Chase was furious that he was being portrayed as a racist. He then escalated things with NBC management, and his Community contract was immediately terminated by mutual consent.
Release Date 2009 - 2015-00-00
Writers Chris McKenna, Hilary Winston, Andrew Guest, Tim Hobert, Karey Dornetto, Stephen Basilone, Emily Cutler, Annie Mebane, Alex Rubens, Tim Saccardo, Paul Isakson, David Seger, Maggie Bandur, Monica Padrick, Matt Murray, Liz Cackowski, Lauren Pomerantz, Dan Guterman, Matt Roller, Ryan Ridley, Carol Kolb, Jon Pollack, Dino Stamatopoulos, Donald Diego
English (US) ·