Compare Season 5 episodes to those from the first two seasons. Even at its most outlandish, classic Community remembered to be a sitcom, unafraid of creating dramatic, emotional moments from simple, honest interactions between its characters. Notice how rare it is in Season 5 to see the gang sitting around the study table, talking not about the plot (e.g., the Save Greendale Committee’s goal in each episode), but about their relationships with one another. The only episodes in Season 5 that pulled this off in any noteworthy capacity were “Bondage and Beta Male Sexuality,” which I would argue was the best and most grounded episode of the season, and “Cooperative Polygraphy,” which couldn’t resist undercutting its emotional bits with a bizarre plot twist about Troy sailing around the world and the introduction of a bunch of sperm canisters (not that those weren’t funny).

4. It’s probably been on too long.

The losses of Chevy Chase and Donald Glover were clear evidence of the series’ gradual breakdown. Coupled with the damage done by Season 4, Community had probably just been dealt one too many blows. The show did its best to soldier onward in spite of its losses, but piling Chang, Professor Duncan (John Oliver), and Buzz Hickey (Jonathan Banks) onto the study group wasn’t the tidiest solution; arguably, it only highlighted the severity of the missing characters. Troy especially was a solid source of positivity. All the other characters have dark streaks running through their personalities and the brightness Troy brought to the group was never replicated.

But truly, Community probably should have ended years ago. You may have noticed I didn’t suggest comparing Season 5’s quality to that of Season 3. That’s because, though Season 3 never reached the lows that the tail end of 5 did, the problems of 5 simply feel like the inevitable culmination of mistakes that began before Dan Harmon’s firing. Again, Season 5 did not succeed as a reboot. It did, however, get the show back on track, as it felt convincingly like, in terms of tone and quality, we’d picked up right where we’d left off before Season 4 derailed everything.

Unfortunately, the track Season 3 had been on was an unsound one, headed for an overly cartoonish, louder, and dumber version of Greendale. I had this sense back in Season 3 that the show needed to end before it did serious damage to itself and it seemed Harmon did too, based on the finale, which felt far more conclusive than the crap endings Seasons 4 and 5 served up. Too bad one year later he’d apparently forgotten about all that.

Most sitcoms work fine for years upon years because they let their characters and setting operate in a sort of limbo in which everything more or less resets from episode to episode. There are no huge consequences or developments, meaning a new viewer can jump into any episode from any season of 2 Broke Girls or The Big Bang Theory at any time and feel just as welcome as a longtime fan. Community rejected this conventional sitcom approach early on, challenging and developing itself and its characters constantly. This is what made it so exciting and rewarding for fans, but it’s also an extraordinarily difficult format to sustain. The more ambitious a show is early on, the more it will struggle to maintain that level of ambition later and, unfortunately, unlike The Big Bang Theory, which can comfortably churn out the same crap for eons to come, if your show is defined on ambition, even a hint of stagnancy stands out as a grievous misstep.

5. There was a lack of ambition and development.