Megan Ganz, a longtime Community writer who joined the show in season two and stayed on for the yet-to-air post-Dan Harmon fourth season, announced via a letter to Reddit today that she has left the show to take a new job on Emmy juggernaut Modern Family. Season 4 of Community has already wrapped production, but it’s still all being edited together and finished up. Ganz wrote two of Season 4’s upcoming 13 episodes, entitled “Paranormal Parentage†and “Advanced Introduction to Finality†(the final episode of the season), and she mentions in her Reddit letter that she still has to return to Community’s production offices to oversee editing on that final episode. With Community’s fate up in the air post-season 4 and with star Chevy Chase and creator Dan Harmon having parted ways with the series this past year, you can’t blame Ganz for jumping to Modern Family, a show that’s free of Community’s inner turmoil and constant cancellation fears. Still, hopefully if Community beats the odds and gets picked up for a fifth season, Megan Ganz will be able to return in some capacity. Hit the jump to read her reflective, heartfelt Reddit post in its entirety:
“Does anyone know how long it takes paper mache to dry?â€That was the first line I ever wrote for Community. I’d gotten other small jokes and similar word fragments into earlier episodes, but #208 was my first episode, and this was the first line, and I remember it went all the way from my writer’s draft to set basically unchanged. Through rewrites I watched it bob along, past Harmon’s mighty hammer, right on through to the table read and into the sides that were given to the actors on the first day of filming. It was like when you and your friends would race leaves down the river–if you grew up in Michigan and did that sort of thing.We filmed the bottle episode in chronological order so this was the first line that we shot and I remember sitting at the monitors at 7am on the first day thinking, “If they call action and no one runs in here screaming ‘stop the TV-equivalent of presses,’ then I will have written a line that will appear on a television show. I’ll be a television writer.†And the director did call action–as they do–and so I was. Just like that.For the last three years, the sum total of my contribution to this planet (in terms of effort, passion, and things I let myself go soft and pimply for) could be described as follows: Community. Recently, I was offered a job writing forModern Family, and although it’s unclear what will happen with Community for the fifth season (or the sixth season, or the movie), I’ve decided to take this new position. Tomorrow is my first day and I’m excited and scared to start this new… well, everything. I’m sure the coffee will probably be the same.This isn’t the end of me and Greendale. Community was my world for four seasons and my job for three, and has hold of my whole heart like a bad-news high school boyfriend. I’ll never really get away. The chemistry is too perfect and the writing room couches aren’t really that uncomfortable to sleep on and I just can’t stop writing for Britta. Plus I still have to do my editing pass on the finale. I think I left a box in my office, too. Bobrow probably misses me. Better stop by on my way home.I guess what I’m saying is, it took me a really long time to write this to you guys, and it’s not even that good. Pretty sappy, no punchlines, kind of vague about my future with the show, too little excitement about the new gig, etc. Okay, so not my best work. Maybe I’ll take it down and not say goodbye just yet. I just need a little more time.About three hours longer than it took Duncan to think up this assignment.