Community, the tv show

travelled back in time to the early '00s

Man, this Yahoo Screen ap suuuuuucks. everytime I paused the show it reverted back to the beginning.

Btw the Harmontown doc is on Netflix

the harmontown doc was what got me to stop listening to harmontown

Too into the cult of personality for me. I like his shows though, and don't fault him for making money. But I have watched every episode of Community and it is good, cleverly-written sometimes-meta pop tv. But not a life-changing work of art that I must delve into, or see a movie about the making of.

I can see it being appealing if you are working in the entertainment industry. Doesn't he talk a lot about his process? It seems like hard work, talking about how hard you are working all the time /jk

harmontown movie is a doc of when he took his podcast on the road, so it's mostly harmon being a sad alcoholic who is really mean to his friends and himself and occasionally hosting a show where he says cruel things to his then-girlfriend (now wife)

According to imdb he has written 9 episodes of tv in the past 5 years. I thought he wrote way more than 7 episodes of Community.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1363595/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1

Oh why would you want to support that kind of behavior?

xp The way the sitcom "writer's room" set up is done these days, a team of writers works on every script, credit is distributed to the primary writer for that episode. The showrunner like Harmon typically writes/edits/contributes to every script on the show, credited or not.

I think this more than likely has to do with Hollywood/union royalty structures

I can see that.

Is it normal for them to credit non-showrunner writers as having written episodes? For instance Emily Cutler is credited for 5 Community episodes, including the first Paintball episode. That is 2 less than Dan Harmon. I tried finding out more from his 4-part season 2 AV Club interview but the only time he mentions Emily he doesn't talk about her as a writer but how bringing in women writers changed the atmosphere.

whoever is assigned the first draft is credited as the writer, generally. but the pitches come from everyone on staff. after the first draft other writers do "passes" on the episode, including the showrunner, and individual jokes are fixed by committee.

If Harmon wants to portray himself as some kind of comedy writer that is fine, but he needs to step it up imo. Louis C.K. wrote 61 episodes in that same amount of time, compared to his 9. He also earned directing, acting, and producing credits on 40+ episodes.

Or is Louis C.K. not a showrunner? Do they have a different system set up for credits and such being network vs. cable?

lol @ Harmon and Louis even being in the same league in any regard.

louis runs his own show and has full creative control on an extremely small budget. he's essentially making small art films that occasionally have jokes. the system community runs on is the system network and cable comedy have been using at least since the 60's. i mean how many episodes of 30 rock did tina fey write? she was usually credited w/ abt 4 or 5 a year. but if you think that wasn't her show, that it wasn't her voice the writers were emulating, that she didn't have creative control of the jokes that got into the show etc, that'd be silly. it's harmon's decision who gets writing credit and as i understand it he's pretty liberal about not crediting himself when he's written the vast portion of a show's dialogue.

louis' situation is unique in the history of american tv, fwiw.

Tina Fey got full writing credit for 31 episodes period in addition to exec producer and actress in pretty much all 138 eps yeah she is a badass.

xp yeah it should be said that Louis' deal is pretty crazy and groundbreaking and of course no network is rushing to offer similar deals

also there are showrunners who hoard credit as well. whether that's deserved or not obviously depends on the show, but one example was Aaron Sorkin on The West Wing who actually did cram out every word of every single script for like three seasons coked out of his goddamn mind

i heard something similar about Weiner on Mad Men as well, but I don't watch it, so i'm out of the loop on that one

Most of Harmon's writing credits prior to Community are all short films and/or parodies, as in he is interested in coming up with concepts, not so much sketching them out. Nothing with a long narrative or interesting dialog, just lots of clever concepts. I bet he didn't actually write most of the jokes in Community.

Weiner notoriously hoards writing credits on mad men, it's true. he shares or owns credit on like 3/4 of the episodes last I checked.

Harmon heavitly rewrites each and every episode of Community, everyone agrees on that. As could be seen in season four, his voice is essential to the show. His lack of credits only mean that he is generous with doling out credit - and cash - to the other writers on the show. It's a very nice thing, imo.

Yes, even when he does a page-one rewrite - and he did the final script for every episode of season one, for example - he never takes credit from a staff writer.

So he is generous with doling out credit to the writers who are writing the show? And it is a nice thing he is doing by paying them money? Isn't is standard practice to pay the writers of a show money and give them credit?

He's being generous by giving them SOLE credit (and hence more royalties) since he could by all rights take co-credit on every script, like Weiner. But that's sort of standard practice tbh, since most showrunners are already credited as producers and getting some other kind of backend.

i think it's standard practice for showrunners to not take script credit, i think significantly because of union matters but also just the etiquette of the situation (especially re things like 'story credit', which is something showrunners will often have the right to but won't take). i imagine with someone auteur-ish showrunners like harmon it will often involve them having the idea for the episode, writing a significant outline, then passing it on to the credited writer to produce a draft before it goes to harmon and the rest of the writing room for redrafting, but still then there'll be no showrunner credit.

Someone just convince me he did not come up with some brilliant outlines and then wander around drunkenly from dept. to dept. - occasionally making "auteur" demands and doing self-promotion on social media -- while the show was being made around him.

Like he is on a bender and then the script comes in and he is in a drunken fever pining over the purity of his creation and rewrites a few references and lines of dialog and he has "rewritten the script to suit his vision".

How come seasons 5 and 6 aren't up there with 2 and 3? Was it his brilliant vision to let the quality just slide?

Easy to be a "Ninja of alcholism" if there is a whole team of people backing you up and cleaning up after your messes.

it's almost as if American comedy shows with niche concepts organically run out of steam in later seasons

i think the show might've been better off if they went with the conjectured "replace the cast every four years" plan

3 of the originals are already gone at this point, anyway

Adam, you're grinding a weird axe itt imo

like everyone who educated about how american sitcoms are produced is like "well, no, not exactly" to basically everything you bring up trying to tear some guy down and you keep coming up with random conjecture to continue spitting on the guy, idk man

How is this random conjecture? He admitted he is an alcoholic and he was famously fired for being an abusive one who could not do his job. Dude has a movie out about a tour about a podcast about how he is a genius writer. The internet is filled with people fawning over him. I'm sure he can take the criticism that perhaps people other than him are why Community was so successful.

I looked at how many episodes he wrote compared to his peers and it was lacking. You guys reminded me of TV working practices, ok, I get that. You realize that does not mean that he DID write all those episodes, but that those episode were written by the staff writers and him collaboratively. Take "Remedial Chaos Theory", a classic episode that is evidence of the creative brilliance of the show. It was written by Chris McKenna, who based it on the idea from Megan Gunz. Dan Harmon's original idea for that episode was a riff on the way you respawn after death in videogames. Yet if you look anywhere online he says the original idea was to copy "Rashomon", "Run Lola Run", and "Sliding Doors". It's like he is trying to score points with my Film 101 professor from 1999.

harmon is definitely not a guy who knows much about films other than like Robocop and Die Hard, I'll give you that.

and hey I'm the guy who said the Harmontown movie was so gross it made me give up on the guy, so I'm not defending him as a genius or a dude I love, I just think there's a huge gray area between louis ck and laughable hack.

Word yeah I just need to ignore DH entirely. I wasn't calling out anyone on this board in particular but rather the general perception, DH's bullet-proof brand.

there's a very blackhearted part of me that almost admires harmon for saying, "you wanted your little hashtag to work, huh? well here's your goddamn sixth season and probably your goddamned movie, you asked for it!!" regardless of quality

...and then I remember how distasteful I find the obvious cynicism involved in this completely unwarranted revival of community. and yet ppl seem fairly happy about it, and I don't think that makes them dupes by default, so it's a complete gray area for me. I don't think I've watched an extended stretch of community episodes since season 3

interesting to mention weiner upthread, bc like harmon he is roundly regarded as both a pretty brilliant TV mind (weiner may legit deserve "genius") and kiiiind of an awful person. this has always been something I wonder about. like when I hear an artist of any kind I like is a complete dickbag, I always get kinda bummed even though I know I shouldn't really care about their personalities long as they aren't committing crimes or being bigots

"That was the fanciest sentence I ever heard, and I used to watch Frasier"

Sorry that should have gone in the "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" thread.

We'll clean up your mess you, drunkie

yahoo screen makes this unwatchable

given that they own the content, they should be able to work out the buffer lengths necessary to make good streaming possible.

i didn't have any problems (or ads, weirdly) using the xbox app

finally saw these, first ep was very blah to me, but I dug the 2nd episode. Dean in virtual reality was great, and portugese gremlins cracked me up

If anyone here liked E3, please tell me why and/or how and I'll listen.

The kids pranking the Dean was funny, as were the asides, but the main plot strand just wasn't funny at all.

In general, the bits of to the side of this season have been great, but the chemistry just isn't there between the main group any more. There's a lot of heart missing without Shirley and Troy there. The thudding repetition of "they gave a degree to a dog" suggested that maybe Harmon isn't trying as hard as he would have for network TV.

Britta parts were good, rest was pretty mediocre
I liked the bits with the Japanese kids and the ending tag

Also I still don't understand the point of Keith David's character, and I wish the show had gone to a bit more trouble to establish relationships between the group and the new characters before throwing them straight into forced plot conceits. That was Community's big strength in the first season.

Abed's AV nerd bit was great