Season 4 was not bad. I don't mean it was still good even though it was the weakest link. I mean it was on par with it's prior seasons. It had the same quality of jokes and continued the story in an impactful way. I know Harmon wasn't there and all but I really couldn't tell. If anything I saw more difference in season 5 than season 4 when comparing to the first 3 seasons. I know people say that some of the plots didn't really lead the characters to become any different but that's a lot of episodes in the show. That's almost Dan Harmon's whole thing, and it wasn't even his season.

Pierce was treated poorly around the end of his time. Cooperative Polygraphy put his character back to where he was in season 3. I know why this happened with the BTS stuff but I thought he had become a good character after season 3 and not one that was only there to cause destruction. Part of this comes from me looking deeper into what Chevy Chase did/does. Yeah he was hard to work with. Yeah he did some bad things on set. Yeah he's earned his reputation. But when viewing the show this second time around, I came the the realization that maybe the show wasn't letting Chevy Chase be Chevy Chase, and I don't mean him not being the main star of the show. Chevy in his prime was witty and just had good jokes. His comedy also had an obvious amount of clumsiness (or just a lot of falling over). In Community, that wasn't his character, mostly. He was a stereotypical old man where he just said the things that weren't supposed to be said. He also might not have had the physical ability play into the clumsiness that he used to do with his age. For that I can partly see why he left.

If you disagree with either of these then you're probably right but I really wanted to put this out there.