Big News for 'Doctor Who' and 'Community'

Yesterday saw some huge developments take place at the top for both Doctor Who and Community, which means we'll be seeing two drastically different shows come the start of next season.

Let’s start first with the news the eleventh Doctor is shutting the TARDIS door for one last time this Christmas. Matt Smith officially announced yesterday that after the 50^th anniversary episode and the Christmas episode one month later, he will be stepping down from the iconic role. On a personal note, Mat Smith was my first Doctor. I had heard from several people that Doctor Who was a fantastic sci-fi show that involved time travel and adventure and that if I started at the beginning of series five I wouldn’t have been lost at all with the story. So I watched all of season five in two days and immediately became a Whovian. I then went on to watch from the beginning of the new series starting with Eccleston, then to Tennant (who barely edges out Smith for my favorite), and then of course series 6 and 7 under Smith.

There was plenty of Who that existed prior to Matt Smith, and one can only hope there will be much more after him, but he was my first Doctor, and for that his tenure was of great importance to me. I do think that in terms of his time on the show, and the stories he covered, that this is the right time for him to leave. I would have loved to see him spend another full series with Jenna-Louise Coleman's Clara, or some episodes under a different show runner than Moffat just to see how he would react to a different type of storytelling. But he was able to showcase many different emotions like anyone who steps into those shoes must and when all is said and done he will be remembered for his astounding portrayal of the Doctor over the course of these four years.

I’ll be curious to see who they will get to be number 12. John Hurt was introduced as The Doctor at the end of the series finale but most of us are assuming that he won’t be an official “Doctor” and he will be more of a one-off character for the 50^th. That being said I wouldn’t mind if they did go with an older type like Hurt to change-up the pace of the story a little bit. Whomever they do decide to go with certainly has a tough act to follow and it would probably behoove them if Moffat followed Smith’s lead and left with him so that series 8 has a completely fresh feel to it like series 5 did after Tennant and Davies departed.

Speaking of show runners, the very eccentric Dan Harmon is returning to the beleaguered Community for season 5. When the show got picked a few weeks ago for a final season, die-hard fans of the Greendale Gang rang out a collective sigh of “meh, that’s good I guess.” As excited as I was that the show somehow got that fourth season, despite losing Harmon, I was equally disappointed three episodes into season four when the realization hit that this was not the same show without the genius/lunatic running this mad world that he created. And then, of course, there was the finale: ‘Advanced Introduction to Finality’ which was a down right insult to creative integrity and all but certainly would have caused a great deal of fans, myself included, to stop watching the show entirely.

But then, riding back in almost as mysteriously as he rode out(*), Dan Harmon confirmed via Twitter that he is indeed back and that all is right with the world again! Or at least we again have reason to hope that Community can return to the wild, ingenious little show that it once was. Writers David Guarascio and Moses Port took over for Harmon when he left and it’s hard to blame them too much for the failure of season four since it had always been a show reliant on the weird intricacies of Harmon’s mind, but I certainly would have liked to see them try out some new things of their own and not rely almost entirely on premises that existed before they came in.

(*) Or, you know, got fired.

I’m really glad that Chase is gone and Harmon is back for these final 13 episodes and it will be fun to speculate on how Harmon will go about treating what happened in the fourth season. I imagine he’ll debate about making the entire fourth season a dream of some sorts, but ultimately I think he’ll keep it as part of the show’s cannon. I could see him starting the season off with a Wire-esque montage of the rest of the characters graduating so that they can leave Greendale like he had intended going into season five. However he decides to go about treating the previous 13 episodes though is ultimately unimportant and I’m really thankful we’ll get one more season of a show I once really loved with all of it’s important parts back in place.

What did everyone else think of these recent developments? Comments are always welcome.