Dan Harmon’s Community: New Media Mentality, Old School Show

Yesterday one of my favorite comedy blogs, Splitsider offered a great post on Dan Harmon‘s ideas on storytelling, and how his ideas and experimentation as co-creator of Channel101 helped inform the fluidity and craft of his new show, Community. It’s a great crash-course in Harmon’s dogma, and how it applies to virtually everything he writes — from early 101 hits like Laser Fart all the way through the densest episodes of Community. I bring this up not only to recommend the article, but to ponder the consequences of new media artists working in traditional hollywood.

In this current, albeit transitional, climate where for many working in new media is still a stepping stone to working in traditional TV and film, how will that inform the way traditional TV is made? We’ve already seen a great influence on the way TV shows are marketed and presented, but what happens when you have artists trained-up in drastically different schools of thought “graduating” to the mainstream big leagues?

Consider that most web writers have re-wired their conception of pacing, story structure, character development, and comic timing to fit into a much shorter window. Dan Harmon managed to cram all his ideas about story structure, masturbating, and what he would do if he had superpowers into one 3 and a half minute short, so why wouldn’t each of his 7 characters get their own arch in a single episode of Community? What’s going to happen when we see writers whose exposition is merely the title of the show, when their show takes place in real time, when it takes place across 5 different platforms, when it’s structured around real world “touch-points”– what happens when writers who are used to innovating, used to owning everything and used to working without any creative restrictions get handed cash and a TV slot? Ask Dan Harmon.

I think he’s on the toilet in this picture. Fitting, as I wanted to work in his sarcastic manifesto on making a shitty Channel 101 show. Also worth the read.