Dan Harmon walks us through Communitys second season

by Todd VanDerWerff June 7, 2011 In its second season, Community tried so many different things that it sometimes seemed like a different show every week. In 24 episodes that aired from September of 2010 to May of 2011, the show visited genres and episode types as diverse as zombie tales, stop-motion animated Christmas specials, and clip shows. Along the way, it attempted to tell a complicated story about the ways in which its central characters could be just as bad for each other as they were good friends to each other. Series creator and executive producer Dan Harmon sat down for an epic interview with The A.V. Club to talk through the season, episode by episode, and his thoughts will appear over the next four days. Today: the first six episodes, spanning from the season premire, Anthropology 101, to Halloween episode (and zombie epic) Epidemiology. Anthropology 101 (Sept. 23, 2010) Another year begins at Greendale, and Jeff must deal with the fallout from the season one finale. Betty White guest stars as a crazed anthropology teacher. Dan Harmon: There was a laundry list that we started with. One was to have them take a different class. Now, obviously, at the end of the first season, they were already teeing that up. I did that on purpose, because I wanted to be able to point to something. I didnt want to have conversations over the summer with brass about the still-to-be-defined template of the show. My fear was that unless I directly conflicted with that in the narrative of the show, then over the summer we were going to have these meetings and people were just going to decidenot because it makes a better TV show, but because its less scary to themto keep things the same. I knew that the hub of the show was that study room, so I knew that they had to, academically, have tasks ahead of them to thinly justify them sitting down at this Cheers bar. It has to have something to do with supposedly studying. So it couldnt be gym class, for instance, it couldnt be survivalism class or anything that would have maybe been more fun. It had to have some roots in academia, and I cited anthropology in the first season as my preference. My thought at the time was, Well, this is a topic that, way more so than Spanish, which is a one-joke topic, could actually furnish us with story ideas. I turned out to be incorrect. Anthropology class was not a backbone at all, much less was it sprouting limbs from which we were telling stories, but the thought at the time was that with a topic like anthropology, which is literally the study of humanity, that we would have all kinds of excuses and opportunities to have assignments. Both as a matter of preference and as a matter of logic, Ken Jeong was not going to be the teacher. So we talked a lot about, Is he going to be in the study group or? And the decision was, Lets improvise. It was [executive producer] Garrett Donovan who presented that solution, which I was surprised to hear because it sounded like the kind

of thing that comes out of my mouth, typically, and frustrates a logical guy like Garrett. But his logic told him the thing to do here is to embrace the very energy that were having in this conversation, which is, What do we do? Embrace the confusion, embrace the idea of this character as a Gollum-like figure, this underbrush figure. He defines the perimeter of the campfire because hes neither necessarily having a seat, nor is he a monster out in the dark, but hes just sort of out there.

The first episodeand Ill put it on the DVD so people can see itthere was a debate about the ending. We do an ending of the first episode, where Jeff does the standard, ironic setup of, Oh, whats the worst that can happen if Changs in the study group? and we cut to this sort of Gollum scene where hes stroking the study room table, and it cuts back and forth, so there was pushback on that from the network, predictably enough, because its weird. And I was going, Okay, first day of school, no problem, pushback, lets use this as an opportunity to make this even better. The way I make things better is by grounding them, darkening them, edging them, so I actually preferred the new thing that we did shoot, which was Joel saying, Whats the worst that can happen? And you just cut to Chang walking outside the medical office, and the camera dollies on him, and hes twitching. And hes got this glare in his eye, and its just a very slow dolly, and you hear, faintly, the sort of Chinese lullaby that you heard in Modern Warfare, when he was Chow Yun-Fat. And you hear, also, inexplicably, other sounds including a baby crying, and it builds to this intensity. I liked it. It reminded me more of Spaced, where its like, Okay, this is funny because its not that funny. And, predictably enough, being presented with those two choices, the brass wanted the silly Gollum ending. The problem was that Im a creative, I cant unring bells, so I had seen that ending with Chang, and I had fallen in love with the storyline that we were gonna pursue. The reason I put the baby crying in there was because I wanted to link it with this concept that Chang had eaten his twin in utero, which was a joke that Andrew Guest had written in the first season for the Family Day episode. It feels like such a throwaway, but I just was in love with the idea of actually revealing this incredibly deep foundation to his personality and disorders, and we had this whole thing plotted out where we were going to tell this seasonal story of how hes plagued by the guilt that his mother put in him that he had a twin in the uterus, and it was a little girl, and he ate her. And [his mother] dressed him up in little dresses and said, I wish you were your sister instead, and that rejection triggers these psychotic breaks in him. We were gonna slowly bring in the ghost of his dead sister, playing with a little ball and encouraging him to do bad things. We were gonna slowly uncork that, one step at a time, so that we wouldnt have to pitch it to anybody, because obviously the answer would be, No, dont do that. And so I started looking at Chang like a big joke that would happen one joke at a time. So its ironic, sometimes, that the people who wanna protect your show from too much craziness often cause a less marketable craziness. Like, Oh, that seems weird, dont put it in the show, or, Okay, that seems less weird than the weirder thing, so do that instead. And you end up with a character who spendsand this is not a bad thingthe year not knowing his place because hes been disconnected from his God, i.e. the writers. So he just wanders, and that was the big discussion: what to do with Ken Jeong at the beginning of season two.

There was the macro-directive on my part, and I knew this would be an easy thing: The cameras gonna start going off-campus. That means were gonna see where some of these people live. Its probably time to reveal that Annie lives in relative squalor, for instance, which is something Ive been talking about since the beginning of the first season. Its time to hint at backstories. We dont have to break stories anymore around third-act dances and social functions, because those were all a result of me raining on the writers parade in the first season, saying, Trust me, we have to keep the camera on the campus because it pays off later. There was talk about Annie and Britta, Annie and Jeff, Britta and Jeff, and all that stuff. Very early on[producer] Emily Cutler was a driving force behind thisin one of our first conversations about the season, we were having the conversation about the eventual reveal that Jeff and Britta were fuck buddies. And that conversation came from my anxiety about, How do you follow Pam and Jim without doing a sad attempt to recreate the same energy, which would be mistrusted, or B: ignoring it and not giving the audience food that they eat, i.e. romance, sexuality between men and women. So I said, There must be so many more ways of portraying sexuality on television. But that led to the road of like, What is the punk-rock thing to do? What is the selfdestructive thing to do? How do we convince the audience that we dont intend to sell them snake oil? And the answer is: You take a can of snake oil, and you dump it down the storm drain in front of the audience and you go, This isnt the business that were in, I swear to God. So, second season, that conversation resulted in Emily Cutler saying, What if you just found out toward the end of the year that Jeff and Britta have been doing it the whole time, and it was no big deal? And I thought that was genius because the audience might not believe you if you just tell them on camera in real time that its possible for a relationship to not eclipse everything, but they wont believe it in their hearts, because they havent seen any evidence that its possible for a relationship to not eclipse everything. Guess what, as many of you in the audience have been doing at various points in your lives, particularly the broken points, two of these people have been, in an ungodly middle finger to our fairytale perceptions of monogamy, using each other as sex toys. Presenting the idea that youre full of shit believing that, too, was intriguing to me because thats how the relationship with my girlfriend and virtually betrothed mate happened. It started as friends with benefits. It started with this ironically romantic concept that romance didnt need to be in the equation. It made it exciting. Love always finds a way. If two people have been hurt enough, they trick themselves into falling in love through a different door. They just need to protect themselves with a certain chant beforehand, like This is bullshit. And, for that reason, what I love is when the show doesnt presume any factual positions on things that have any binary truth to them. Is there any such thing as true love? The question is the important thing. Theres no answer. Ultimately, the more important issue at hand became the sand trap that we had knocked our ball into at the end of season one with this huge cliffhanger. Not only that, but we had suggested that Troy was moving in with Pierce. We had suggested that Britta had

said I love you to Jeff and that had gone unanswered and he had gone and made out with the other girl. And we talked about how The Sopranos never did that. You know, they would just end, and everyone would have dinner. And I had also seen the finale for Spaced between the first and second seasons. It reminded me of The Wire and these shows that take a deep bow and say, Thank you for watching a great season of television, and it accomplishes the same thing as a cliffhanger, which is to increase your excitement to see the next season. So I was intent in the first couple episodes of the first season: Okay, second season were ending... were just gonna take a bow. It ended up not happening. Theres a little cliffhanger aspect to the end of the second season. But Im all the more determined to do it in the third season.

Accounting For Lawyers (Sept. 30, 2010) Jeff returns for a party at his old law firm and brings the rest of the group with him. Drew Carey guest-stars as a powerful man with a hole in his hand. DH: Were spending a majority of the episode not only off the campus, but in Jeffs origins, his old life. And were bringing in guest stars as if theres an entirely different show out there for each character. And that, in its very nature, is going to provoke conversation about stunt casting, whether you like it or not. At the same time, its those kind of roles that I applaud being stunt cast, because as long as you do it appropriately, it actually supports your narrative purpose. For instance, in Drew Careys case, the reason why I think thats a beautiful piece of casting is that, in a meta sense, he is what he is. In a fourth-wall sense, he is an old familiar friend with a pleasant demeanor and a disturbing amount of power. There are important implications there about the world that Jeff comes from. Jeffs relationship with that character is very important to me because theres a lot more to learn about Jeff Winger and why he is the way he is. And it has a lot to do with something Im very invested in, which is bootstrapping versus blue-blooding and the issues that occur between self-made men and men that are born. There are good guys and bad guys in both lineages. Thats a truly American topic. We all worship the dollar and we all sort of dream of being important. And youve got people who are born important, and youve got people who will do anything to become one of those people. And that forms a lot of personalities, especially between fathers and sons. Maybe its just me, because my dad was definitely a self-made man, and Im sort of obsessed. I have class issues. I hate rich people so badly that I wanna become one really bad. And its all kind of interesting stuff to me. AVC: Was there any pushback on going off-campus from the writers or the network? DH: Certainly not the writers, because theyd dreamed of having such freedom forever. Its like getting the keys to the car. The stories that you typically tell, its not natural to be confined to this purgatory, so theres no pushback there. And no, I dont there was any pushback from anybody up top, either, because at the time it didnt represent any sort of larger issue.

It wasnt until we got picked up for a third season that there started to be discussions about how to freeze time and keep people going to a community college for 20 years, with the low-hanging fruit answer being, Stop saying its Halloween every October, stop saying that Annie is now 21 and then 22, stop saying that its a four-year degree. Just drop it and be Welcome Back, Kotter. Not a noble suggestion. Not one with the audiences mind and heart in interest. Not thinking of people as individuals, just thinking of the audience as this big blob of money that watches or doesnt watch. And I know in my heart of hearts, I would bet my life on it, that if you think the show would be disappointing if, in year five, they all simultaneously left Greendale, blew it up with dynamite and started working at a pet shop across the street If you think thats disappointing, you have no idea how disappointing it would be if, at the end of year four, Jeff looked at his degree and went, Wait a minute! You spelled degree wrong! Another four years! You may think thats gonna make the show last eight years, but it aint. But when youre in your first season, your goal is to get a second season, and when youre in your second season, you just dont believe youll get a third. Nobody up top believes that statistics are on your side. This is where it usually ends. If we have to promise free ice cream to get to a third season, then we will and then well deal with it. So no, never any real pushback at all. NBCs always really great about letting the show be what the show needed to be.

The Psychology Of Letting Go (Oct. 7, 2010) When Pierces mother dies, he comes to believe that her soul is housed in a lava lamp, rather than grieve. DH: Troy and Pierce living together This was an attempt to sort of feather that in, I think, because otherwise it just felt odd that we forgot about it. It turned out to not be an odd thing at all. Fuck it. Just follow your heart, and if two guys are set to move in together at the end of season one and you do nothing with it, it must be for a good reason. We were blinded by the shiny, seemingly sandbox-y concept of those two being roommates, but then we had this honest conversation: What do we do, what are the premises? Do we build an entire set thats like a breakfast nook in this mansion? Do we do Silver Spoons stories? And we sobered up about that. But before we did, the possibility barrel that was scraped was furnishing things about the Laser Lotus Cult because we felt like that was a topic that could suck Troy in and also function as a Pierce-alone story and simultaneously generate some comedy. I think the question probably became: Weve already accepted that everyone is a different religion, but can we put that to the test now? And the answer is basically yeah, the guy next to you is a cuckoo bird and says that God says its okay to be a cuckoo bird, and if youre liberal, you can still handle that. But if youre a narcissistic liberal, and youve recently had your God taken away from you by virtue of finding out that youre mortal after all We just sort of landed on that gradually, this concept that Jeff was such a flawed character that you could tell him that he had high cholesterol, and it could give him an existential crisis because he didnt know, he hadnt really realized

fully in his heart that he would one day not exist, and that that would actually provoke him to get into the business of invading other peoples religions. I think part of the reason we flopped episodes two and three is because I got anxious about that one. I think that was kind of a misfire, frankly. The whole B-story was literally about Annie and Britta changing sweaters and doing impressions of each other. The buck stops here. I remember running with that ball, just sort of falling into that, Yeah, this feels good because this feels like something on television. And once we were on the set and I was watching this thing unfold and then editing it, I was like, What have I done? This is like Small Wonder or something. You could hear the spaces where theres supposed to be a multi-camera audience applauding because someones dressing like the other person and doing an impression of them. This is your second episode of a season that no one watched the first season of. This is both pretentious, presumptuous, and, at the end of it all, tacky, twee, and underwhelming. And youre using it to anchor a story about a lava lamp that may or may not contain the soul of Chevy Chases mother? I got really nervous about the episode and thoughtand I think simultaneously the network probably did too, so it was an easy conversation to haveYou know, this Accounting For Lawyers episode is really turning out swell. It really feels like a second episode. And so we made a quick flop. Sometimes that happens. It seems like an even enough exchange, because it felt like they were both just modular episodes, and it was easy enough to put our best foot forward, and we were helping this supposedly weaker episode by getting to know these characters a little more first. You didnt ask for all that commentary on the quality of the episode, but I look back on it like the shadow of what certain people expect of our show when they say, Youre getting too weird. I wonder if they understand what comfort really looks like, and how uncharismatic it would wear on our show. AVC: That was the episode that had the Abed storyline going on in the background. DH: And that was an attempt to cope with that anxiety. I think [writer] Hilary Winston drove that. That was happening in rooms that I didnt have time to be in. I wanna say that Hilary was the driving force behind this concept of just having him doing something in the background the whole episode. I really liked it because it reminded me of MAD Magazine, the little drawings up in the corner. Id finally notice those and go through all the MAD Magazines again and see all these little people having these little stories up in the corners of the pages, these doodles. And I think there were a bunch of pitches about what Abed would be doing in the background. I wish I could remember the clever alternative so you could see the sublime difference between that and then Hilary suddenly coming to me and saying, Pregnant woman gives birth. Its a pregnancy scare. Now that I think of it, the writers pitch was, theres this joke going on in the background that clearly Abed is having a paternity scare. It wasnt until after the table read that I think [director] Anthony Russo said, It feels like youre missing a step there. I think that was sometime after the table read that the decision to actually show the birth happening and then to write backwards from there and actually have the story not be about whos the father, which is just a joke about, oh, Abeds such a stud Its

funny to me that we ended up bothering to do that in the foreground with one of our main characters [later on], when we proved that you can do it in four beats and in the background. Basic Rocket Science (Oct. 14, 2010) The group is tasked with cleaning up an old space simulator, but an unfortunately timed towing leaves them stranded in the desert. DH: The concept didnt come from my love of space or anything like that. The concept came from my love of bottle episodes. My passion for Star Trek is actually rooted in my love of television and the art of franchise and a premise designed to stick people together that have to figure out what to do. I think thats just what good TV is: the Seinfeld Chinese restaurant, parking garage episodes.

The original concept was just that Greendale was so cheap that their space simulator basically was a storage unit, and that the Dean put it in a no-parking zone and it was forklifted or towed. We went from there to why would anyone ever tow a cube thats used to store things, and then we said, Well, maybe its a vehicle in and of itself, and somewhere after that I thought, This is the kind of thing that theyre always talking about for product placement opportunities. Theyre always pitching us dumb stuff that we have to reject, and they dont understand why we have to reject it, because theyll say things like, Well, could Jeffs computer in the computer episode be a Dell computer, and could it be in the frame the whole time? Its stuff that you have to reject because you go, No, were not being precious about this, its going to be distracting. On the other hand, heres this opportunity to show them that Im all for integrated marketing. And so I pitched it as an integrated marketing platform to our own people and had them start calling around Somehow Kentucky Fried Chicken became a concept, and I fell in love with that. It just seems particularly ironic as a juxtaposition. The crispy, deep-fried chicken and space. It just seemed particularly funny to me. I have a weird place in my heart for that episode because, in a vacuum, I just think its brilliant and fun, and its almost like it was before its time in the context of the season. It was too smart, too awesome, too soon. And it needed to come after the zombie episode. It needed to come in the third quarter of the season or something in order to be really appreciated. I understand if the audience didnt like it. Thats when I stopped reading reviews, because I felt like something was happening. I was first starting to see the potential negativity of it, because, in order to get applause at Comic-Con, I was like, Well, this will fucking jazz them. And itll also lock the network into having to accept the pitch, because theyre here in the back, and theyll hear these people applaud. Im going to pitch them a spaceship episode, but now theyll have to say yes. So thats why I did that. But the way the words came out, it was like, Were doing an Apollo 13 homage, and I did not get the applause I wanted because it was not an understandable thing. I cant remember the circumstance of it linguistically, but it seemed weird. It didnt seem like something you would go, Oh, how exciting, I know exactly what youre talking about. It was also inaccurate. Its not an Apollo 13 homage; thats just the way I was trying to get it into five words. And more importantly, it was a terrible,

terrible idea to incite the fan community with anticipation of a blank-themed episode. Ill always be gun-shy about that for the rest of my life. Its my fault. I got whorish. I got weird. I turned into Richard Dawson in Running Man. Here comes Apollo 13! It was important for me to actually see it that way, because then I read Sepinwalls review, and he was underwhelmed. I was like, How can anyone be underwhelmed by the spaceship episode? The answer was, well it is just them in the fucking container. Thats all you ever wanted. You shouldnt have hyped it. It would have been a really pleasant surprise if The Office just did an episode with the space simulator in the parking lot, and it got towed. This is the hardest one to solve, because it came from the best of intentions. From the get-go, we said, Well, crazy episode. Theyre in a spaceship. Why is this not just a stupid, stylistic, masturbatory, spoofy thing? In other words, and the thing we always say is, Whats the Jeff and Britta fucking of this paintball? And the answer was perceived as forced by the audience and critics, which is that Annie just reveals that shes the spy. Shes like the equivalent of a Russian spy aboard the spaceship because shes been thinking about leaving Greendale this whole time, and it was understandably perceived as like, Why the fuck are you forcing that on me just to tell a stupid story like that? I havent watched that episode since. I havent watched any of them since theyve aired. If the second season is like the first season, Ill come out of the DVD commentary realizing this is a great show. But thats the stigma I have against that episode. I feel like I fucked it from outside, and its a victim.

Messianic Myths And Ancient Peoples (Oct. 21, 2010) Shirley hires Abed to produce and direct a YouTube short about Jesus for her church. In the process, he gives in to his own Christ complex. DH: I remember we had a list of the characters on a board with criss-crossed lines between them, and we were analyzing which characters had not had a lot of interaction. Shirley doesnt have a lot of interaction with anybody, but particularly Abed, and I thought, Well, what do I think of when I think of Shirley and Abed? What is a situation that would force them to work together that would also maximize their conflict? The first thought in my head was Ed Wood, the biopic, that concept of a church looking to raise money by appealing to the kids and going to this weirdo to make one of these space movies that the kids love so much. It was an easy thing to think of. Id been saying it for a while, Weve gotta do an episode where Shirley just walks up to Abed and says, Hey, I got a bunch of money from my church; were gonna make a Jesus movie together. And watch them create conflict. Its fish in a barrel because we love to write about Hollywood and acting and shooting and writing, and now we get to because itll be anchored by the least insideindustry character of all, Shirley. And so that was pretty easy to break, because I just said to [writer] Andrew Guest, The obvious thing to do is that Abed is the Christ figure. In spite of not being Christian and in spite of Shirley defending Christianity, the irony will be that shes actually a Pharisee. If youre true to the tenets of the gospel, you

should always think twice before bringing the hammer down on anybody unpopular. It seems to be the fundamental lesson that gets obfuscated. And then I said, Well break that story with Abed as a Christ figure, but then we have to balance that, because heres where were in danger: People are going to see politics where there are no politics, and theyre gonna see bullying where theres no bullying. Whats worse, what I really didnt predict happening, is [people thought] I was almost too kind to Shirley. The message felt too Christian to people. My fear in breaking the story was of being perceived as a West Coast liberal atheistic bully. Once again, just hanging up this easy piata of the flyover states religion and smashing it with a bat and going like, You guys are so dumb, you dont even know how dumb you are. I think even as a liberal, I feel like its a cheap shot. Yeah, theres a lot of dumb people that say a lot of dumb things. Doesnt that make them an easy target, and doesnt that make the act of bashing them actually less comedic than political? I wanted to make sure that Abed was guilty of his own sins, and I didnt know what to do except make them my own and put myself in Abeds shoes and say, What gives you a Christ complex? Well, taking myself too seriously. I wanted both characters to be equally flawed and equally justified and equally capable of teaching the other an incredible lesson about life. And Abed is, for a great number of reasons, an unrepentant narcissist. Or maybe narcissism isnt the right diagnosis. Hes just so self-assured and so into his work. And you go through all these different permutations of, Well, thats the cool guy, because he just wants to make cool movies, and then the conversation, You know who really wanted to make the coolest movie of all? Jesus Christ! And having that guy get really into it and going, Yeah, youre right! I stayed up all night reading the New Testament, and its actually a really good story. Its especially appealing to me because I feel like Edward Scissorhands, I feel like Marty McFly, I feel like E.T., I feel like Crispin Glover, and thats what I see in these pages. This is an important story for the creative! And it was written by creatives, this story. So I told Andrew, Break the story, break the hacky, low-hanging-fruit version of the story, and well do all the bits about how he made the budget last six days instead of three days; oh, he walked over the Hollywood equivalent of water. We all know its going out the window, but lets use that as a framework, and then lets twist it. Now lets run it through Shirleys story, and lets make them both simultaneously Jesus and both simultaneously Pharisees and really make the first sitcom episode to address the topic of religion in a while that has no opinion about it, except for its a sin to secondguess your friends. Thats all we know, thats all the show knows, that Abed and Shirley make better friends than enemies. We dont know anything about religion or filmmaking coming out of that episode. All we know is that people should probably help each other out. I think its really interesting that Abed actually learns from Shirley that there might be a God out there working through the sometimes seemingly stupid activities of people who operate in His name. Maybe not in the way that they want to, but its all just part of banana peels and stoplights. Idiots are a part of that, so dont just dismiss them because they might actually be carrying some sort of message that they dont want to. And simultaneously Shirley is learning, You know what? Maybe this story is so important, and this deity is so important, and his prophets are so important because you actually

have to walk the walk. It doesnt make any sense that you could be handed a belief system and now everythings easy for you. So I thought that I had succeeded in this sublime act of genius, which is walking through these two laser beams, where its so easy to get your clothes caught on fire on either side. I thought I just walked right through it Then I started reading reviews and comments, and it was like, Oh, that felt treacly and Christian, and I guess we should all worship Jesus now, and I was like, Oh my God, no! I didnt mean that at all!

Epidemiology (Oct. 28, 2010) A Halloween party on campus is ruined by an experimental bioweapon that turns people into something very much like zombies. Troy must save the day. DH: We spent a good month breaking that story in every conceivable other way. We came up with every clever way you could justify zombies on a community college campus and exhausted all of them. The one with the longest shelf life was an experimental pharmaceutical that was being overprescribed. We broke that story, and it was like dog paddling through mud, and it just felt like cleverness for the sake of cleverness. The story just kept being dead weight, like a child that doesnt want to leave a party and goes limp. We can move it because were bigger than it, but theres something wrong. And there was a point where I said, What is our nightmare? What is the biggest sin that were not supposed to be committing here? What started us down the road of thinking of ways to do a zombie movie without doing a zombie movie? What happens in our zombie movie that cant happen in our sitcom? Easy answer: People die. Okay, absolutely right. But how much of the zombie motif has to do with people dying? Well, a lot. Its about diminishing numbers, but the reason numbers diminish is because when you die you become a zombie. What if you became a zombie just by being bitten? And it went down this road very quickly. And that was late in the game. If we hadnt spent a month doing stupid Prozac metaphors, God only knows what could have happened with that episode. But I knew the whole time that this was further than wed ever gone. The litmus test I used to prove that was to run through every episode in both seasons and picture myself reading the events that take place in the story in the local paper. I ran Modern Warfare through that. I ran chicken fingers through that. There was a shortage of chicken fingers on campus, and some kid took over the supply and was selling chicken fingers for favors. Whatever! Why did this make the paper? It was on page eight. There was a paintball game that got out of hand. Somebody built a fire in the cafeteria to warm their hands because the power went out. A guy set off a dye pack, and there were Die Hard themes. Again, it sounds interesting, but if Im more than a city away, its not even in the paper. The military is covering up an experimental bio-weapon in the form of a rabies virus that spreads through bites and turns people into zombies and it was accidentally served at a Halloween party. Yeah. Its on the cover of Time. [Laughs.] No matter where it happened. It could have happened at the North Pole, and youd be reading about it.

Heres why thats dangerous. It doesnt really have anything to do with not believing Peter Pan can fly and now youve damaged the fabric of the universe. Thats not the case, because a sitcom is a fucking constant violation of all reality. Thats the point of it. Its an opiate. You are experiencing life as life is not. In the most successful ones, youre literally hearing 150 people laughing when youre supposed to laugh. It has nothing to do with whether somethings believable. What it has to do with is protecting the characters minds within the canon. The simple example is, I dont wanna be breaking an episode in season five where Britta is arguing with Jeff over the remote and having this thing looming over my shoulder where anybody can stop this argument at any time and say, Britta, why are we arguing about this? The military is lying to the people its supposed to protect. The Pentagon invaded our campus, and it was going to murder us. We were zombies! So when I narrowed it down to that being the thing that was the biggest threat, I came up with the forgivable if obvious solution of amnesia, of just going, Well, if youre not yourself when youre on this stuff, its not that big a deal to say that when you go back to being yourself, you werent collecting memories. Actually, theres some logic there. Its not necessarily a Bold And The Beautiful contrivance to say, Well, you wake up from a roofie. You dont remember. And more importantly, even if it did feel contrived, I felt like it was a noble contrivance because I dont want these people living in a world where thats on the table. It largely had to do with this feeling that drove the whole second season, which was, I have this feeling that Im not gonna be around next year. Im either gonna be fired or the shows not gonna be on the air. In either case, Im never gonna be on NBC at 8 p.m. on Thursday night ever again. This happens to how many people in the last 30 years? And its Halloween? Ive gotta do this. I will drive past this campus every day for the rest of my life and get a sour stomach if I dont do a zombie episode for Halloween. If you told me I had a six-year order of episodes, I could probably see my way to not pollute my show with such fantasy. But it had to be done. [Laughs.] AVC: Thats also the episode where Shirley and Chang hooked up. How much of that arc did you know going into that episode? DH: None. Halloween was where it all began. I dont know how to access the character of Shirley. I dont know who she is. All I know about her is how big her purse is and that she talks like Miss Piggy and Gary Coleman in alternation. I know these circumstantial facts about her: Shes got kids. Her husband left her. Shes a Baptist. Shes allergic to blibbedy-blah. Meanwhile, youve got Britta next to that, which is a fucking phenomenal study in the work you can do developing a character. Ive dated women like Britta. I have politics like Britta. Im awkward like Britta. I pronounce the word bagel like Britta. Theres just a million tools that are brought to bear in creating a character that to me is a unique move in a sitcom. I feel that way on one level or another about almost all the other characters, and my white guilt kept saying to me, Is she sticking out because shes a black woman? And that all the more made me say, Ive gotta get in there. I dont want to perpetuate this cycle. So my impulse was to start doing to her what I was doing to Britta in the first season in response to people saying, We dont like that character. Were not responding to that character. My response was to start pulverizing that character, putting pressure on her,

saying, Youre not supposed to like her. Its all part of the show. Have you ever not been liked? And slowly but surely, this Britta character went from being perceived as a mistake to being perceived as an achievement and numerous peoples favorite character, including mine, frankly. I want to always make sure that all of these characters can all be worlds and universes in and of themselves. And I just felt obstacles there with Shirley, and I felt like I just wanted to make her human. So I had her make out with Chang in the bathroom. Aerodynamics Of Gender (Nov. 4, 2010) The girls and Abed take a class on feminism and get caught in a rivalry with some "mean girls." Jeff and Troy discover a secret trampoline. The A.V. Club: One of the things Ive seen in discussion of the show at our site and elsewhere is the idea that season two got too far away from the season-one formula of everyone taking a class and learning something from it. This is a return to that formula. Was that a conscious attempt to get back to it? Dan Harmon: It was. This is the problem I cautioned people at the start of season two against the dangers of. People wanted to sit down and have those conversations about how many weird episodes vs. how many normal episodes wed have to do, and I didnt want to have that conversation, because can you imagine working on a show where some of the time youre thinking its a normal episode? [Laughs.] Whats a normal episode? 202 is a normal episode. The girls are arguing about how they dress differently, and one of the characters refuses to accept that his mother died. That is a 45-year-old A-B story episode. I couldnt take it anymore. I was compelled to stick Abed in the background. I didnt even think that would be enough, but I got away with it. People liked it. 207 is supposed to be a normal episode the way I would like to do them. I dont know what the fuck a secret garden is. I only know the literal definition of that combination of words, that theres a garden somewhere thats secret. It has all kinds of mythical connotations to me. I dont know what that movie is. Ive never seen that movie. I just thought it was funny. I think [Chris] McKenna pitched it. It was one of those ideas that germinated when I was out of the room. I think Neil Goldman texted me the idea, which was they find a secret trampoline that a janitors been keeping secret since the 70s. I loved it. And the reason I loved it is because theres nothing funny about that. Were not Seinfeld. Its not like the Soup Nazi, where you go, Oh, thats a funny premise. What it is is a story. Its got roots in reality, but more importantly, its got the potential to have real characters be subjected to circumstances that reveal more about them. I do engage in referential, derivative, postmodern, hip-hop storytelling, where you say, Okay, I didnt take music classes. I just have a record of what you did, and Im gonna play it backward. Im gonna play it forward. Im gonna play two at the same time. I have a right to call that music, but I guess I dont have a right to complain when people go, Oh, you must be really into other peoples shit, so whats up next, DJ? I do have to say, I do so many fewer references than people think Im doing. What is the reference to someone discovering something in a garden thats secret? Thats all it is. The ball goes astray. He follows it back. He finds this magnificent thing. Its a 5,000-year-old reference. Its the place thats too good to exist in the outside world.

We play it off as a joke. We do this 30 Rock-style absurd undercut of the whole thing in the end, but the undercut is profound. Jeff throws away this question that only took as long to write as it takes him to say it. It wasnt a big, knit-browed arrival. Jeff just sort of goes, Maybe purity worth protecting isnt actual purity. And hes talking about racism! Hes talking about the fact that if the only thing youre proud of is that youre white, and if whiteness is only achievable through beating people up and keeping people from having sex with your daughter, then what does being white even mean? What are you proud of? Its not even just a hot-button metaphor, because that applies to gated communities, it applies to democracy vs. monarchy, it applies to egalitarianism, it applies to the economy. Things you find yourself gripping white-knuckled, are they valuable or not? And its only a question. I love bringing mythology into a sitcom. I watched it in the mix bay, and I thought, Eh. Its a C-plus. What was the B-story? Oh, was it the RoboCop thing? Again, fucking stories about how women dress. I cant take it anymore. I actually said that aloud during 207. No more stories about sweaters! Enough! I cant take it anymore. Theyre all my ideas initially. I sign off on all of them. But you start these things with the greatest of intentions, but that Mean Girls story[Affects voice of angry viewer.] Mean Girls spoof! What?it was supposed to end with the dean after Abed has Bitchzillaed out the whole school. Once [the dean] accepts the mission, he goes over to a trunk in his office, and hes got some really sharp, stylish clothes in there, and you get a glimpse of the dean before he became a dean. Before the clip-on ties and the short-sleeved shirts, he was actually kind of a committed, really queeny club kid who was really bad-ass and bitchy. He goes up to Abed and takes him out back, and they have this private Every Which Way But Loose kind of bareknuckled bitchfest. And Abed still wins! [Laughs.] I must have been the one to somehow fuck up that story. I dont know how it became Abed walking around and snapping people about their clothes and then learning that he shouldnt. The trampoline story, I really liked. Of course it was the tee-up for this concept that Pierce is the simplest backstory of all. Its just the idea that someones got daddy issues. He says Father as he reaches the apex of the trampoline jump. I love that story. I like the idea that a basketball can roll into a bush at Greendale, and you can find something that is just this silly joke, but can also be an actual story.

Cooperative Calligraphy (Nov. 11, 2010) The bottle episode. When Annie's pen disappears, she is certain one of the group members must have taken it. The group tears the study room apart to find it. DH: That was, Whats the opposite of launching people into space? Lets do that four episodes after we launch them into space. I always said about the show to the writers, our ultimate goal is to get people to stop, make them add a drawer to their filing cabinet. We gotta shake this tendency on the viewer and the critics part to file us somewhere that already exists. Sometimes, I admit, were obnoxiously doing so. Its like kids that do things when theyre 16 to prove they dont have to clean their room. Theyre doing something absurd, but theyre also doing it because its kind of absurd to insist that they clean their room. I wont say whether its a good or a bad thing, or a right or a wrong decision.

I felt like the guillotine was coming on it, and it just started like, fucking going crazy. I never wanted that to become, Oh, its the crazy show. So I always said to the writers, like, Crazy has to have a new definition, too. It has to be about versatility. I always used the metaphor of the elephants trunk, because an elephant can pick up a house key with the tip of its trunk. It has the same dexterity as a pair of human fingers at the end of its trunk, but that same trunk can knock down an entire tree, and both of these things are worth doing, and theyre both breathtaking things to behold. Its just different scopes, different tones, and we want them both. So the bottle episode was definitely directly designed to kind of blow your mind on the heels of getting you accustomed to grandiose experimental tones. To just say, What is it that you want right now? What are you craving? What do you think were not capable of doing? What do you think were hiding with this big cowboy hat? Do you think were bald? No! Full head of hair! And I love bottle episodes. I think they coined the phrase on the Star Trek set because it was a ship in a bottle. They never left the bridge for certain episodes. And when I learned that term, I looked back on Barney Miller and Cheers and Taxi, and, I mean, there are entire series that I just named that are essentially bottle episodes, several episodes in a row, seasons in a row. I think for the first couple seasons of Cheers, the only other set was Sams office, which doesnt even count. All In The Family was always in that living room. Its like youre watching a play. And theres no reason why that cant be good. Theres one reason: if you suck. And Im really arrogant and really competitive and really eager to please my mom, and I really wanted to do a bottle episode. And the writers make that possible, because I could stand up and say that in a room, and I can go and I can work on three other episodes, and when I come back, they can have graphed out on a whiteboard concepts, like Shirleys pregnancy, her pregnancy tests, Abeds menstrual charts, things like that. Sometimes my perception is totally warped, because my side of the story would be, Ugh, that episode was like a hot knife through butter. We should do every episode that way, because its just fucking perfect, and there was never a hitch in that process. Because I just said, Lets do a bottle episode, and we talked about what that meant, and then we brainstormed a few concepts for like an hour, and everybody at the end of the hour was saying, Look, dont use this idea or anything, but Im just saying, it should be simple. It shouldnt be that theres a lightning storm, and the doors all have electronic locks. Just say, for instance, that Annie loses her pen, and she doesnt know who took it. I barfed that out as a placeholder, and we ended up going with it. But my perception is, then I got up and left the room. Im sure there were literally tears shed during the writing of that episode. That was Megan [Ganz]s draft. I think Megan is a remarkable writer, and I just took an immediate liking to her because I came up through features, and I came up through luck and craziness. I didnt come up through the writing staff of other peoples shows, and all Ive ever heard my whole life is people telling me not to get cocky and to know my place and to know protocol and stuff. Those are very valid things, but Im also just used to them as hexes, and I perceive Megans personality as bright and loquacious. And she was the driving force behind, Yes, lets do this bottle episode. She loved the idea, and I think it was a stressful time for her, too, because all of a sudden shes stepping up, and shes at the whiteboard. And it was a profound experience, I think, watching from afar and dipping back into the room now and then, and I was just so proud of her for taking this outline home and

delivering this draft that I read and I went, Switch these two events. If theyre gonna rip his casts off, just because its a physical event, it cant happen as early as its happening, move it to the end of the act, so we build to what feels like a stripping down of the characters physically. Put these events in this order so that physically, you feel that it goes from purses being dumped out to clothes being removed to casts being ripped off to rooms being torn apart. But a lot of that stuff stayed the way it was, because Megans got a great gift for dialogue, and her passion for the show is so evident in that episode. AVC: Youve employed a lot of female writers, in both seasons. Thats not true of a lot of other TV comedies. Was that a conscious decision? DH: It was conscious on the part of [former NBC programming head] Angela Bromstad, before she left NBC. Angela said, Get more women on your staff. Make it half women. I remember going, Are you fucking kidding me? to myself. Okay, I got a sitcom, and this is as far as you go, because Ive just been told that half of my staff needs to be a quota hire. From the mouths of bureaucrats come the seeds of great things. I dug extra hard. You find somebody like Hilary Winston. You find people later like [Emily] Cutler and [Karey] Dornetto. Theyre harder to find. Its definitely not because women aint funny, because Im finding the opposite. Its because theres fewer of them. The statistical probability of picking up a shitty script, its compounded for women. Theres the same percentage of genius happening in both genders, but theres less women writing scripts and out there looking for the job. So you dig a little extra-hard, and you end up with a staff that took a few extra meetings and a few extra shitty scripts to read. Now you have a staff that is just as good as the staff you would have had, but happens to be half women. And it seems like the greatest thing in the world, because the world is half women. And the male writers across the board, from top to bottom, in their most private moments drinking with me, when theyre fully licensed to be as misogynist, reactive, old-boynetwork as they want, all they can say is, This turned out to be a great thing. The energy is different. It doesnt keep anybody polite. Were not doffing our caps or standing up when they enter the room. They do more dick jokes than anybody, because theyve had to survive, they have to prove, coming in the door, that theyre not dainty. Thats not fair, but women writers, they acquire the muscle of going blue fast because they have to counter the stigma. I dont have enough control groups to compare it to, but theres just something nice about feeling like your writers room represents your ensemble a little more accurately, represents the way the world turns. Race is another thing entirely. It would be fantastic to have 18 percent black writers on your TV staff and stuff. But the fact is, black women have ovaries and white women have ovaries; black men have testicles and white men have testicles, so actually, race is far more an artificial construct than gender. Theres a literal, actual difference between men and women, and its in their blood, and its in their brains, and its in their fingertips, and its in our conversations. I think women are different, and I think having them in the room is crucial to a family comedy, ensemble comedy, television comedy, where half the eyeballs on your show are women. As it turns out, I think Megans the only female writer whos staying this year, so now, even though Bromstads gone, now Im carrying this legacy, going, Eh, guys, we really need a half-female writing staff. I

would teach it. I think we have to stop thinking of it as a quota thing and think of it as a common-sense thing.

Conspiracy Theories And Interior Design (Nov. 18, 2010) Jeff's suspicious credit from night school appears to be a real thing... until Jeff reveals he has no idea who the "professor" teaching the class is. AVC: At the Paley festival, you talked about how you werent sure that one was going to work. Was there a moment when you realized it did? DH: The moment I realized I didnt care if other people liked it or notbecause in my opinion, it was a great episode of televisionwas the sound mix, and very often thats where that happens. Its where Mark Binder and Doug Mountain, our sound guys, they put their finishing touches on these episodes, and now the color correction is in place too, and Ludwig Goransson has laid his score in. Its not just like, Well, the episodes 95 percent there, and the last 5 percent is that stuff. If that were the case, you could always tell a good episode from a bad one, because you could go, Oh, it feels like 95 percent of a good episode, so bring in the music! Lay on the frosting! Thats probably the case for multi-camera sitcoms, where you lay in a bass riff and the sound of the door closing. It is not the case with Community, and no episode is more exemplary of that than Conspiracy Theories, because I think Ludwigs work might have ended up being probably 40 percent of whether that episode scans. I couldnt tell it was good until it was absolutely finished. It became an homage to twists, and that was my way of pulling out of what I was scared was going to be a confusing episode. We were working too hard on the actual conspiracy for a while. Chris McKenna, it was his baby and his pitch. All his pitch was the beginning of the story. Jeff took a class called Conspiracy Theories, and the dean is busting his balls about it, confronting him. Then this guy comes out and says, Im Professor Professorson [the professor of the class]. And then he walks away, and Jeff says to Annie, Ive never seen that guy in my life. That was Chris pitch. So its not just building an episode around a joke. Thats a third of the episode, and there was a magic to it. Youre like, God, that is the most intriguing story Ive ever heard in my life. And now the big question becomes What do you do next? Its not typically how we approach stories. Theres not supposed to be that much detail, and then you dont know what happens next. I kept going, Goddammit, were doing this wrong. I know were doing this wrong, because weve built episodes around jokes before. Were supposed to go in passes. Were supposed to know the overall story. We go in, and we add detail, and whenever we dont do that, we have a shitty story. This is a terrible idea. This is like building a bridge while standing on it. You dont know if its going to get to the other side. And then I thought, Thats what this episode is. Just improvise it. Keep going with that energy. Dont add any depth to it; dont add any more pipe. Youve already told the whole story in the first act. In this episode, everything is going to be up for dismissal and conjecture.

And the important epiphany for us was that there needs to be no reality beyond that. It was originally a story that eventually led to the night school and the revelation of this whole faculty that was fake, and they had this sort of conspiracy, and they had a backstory to them, and they offered Jeff a place at their side, and he had to choose between Annie and it. The lesson from the space-bus episodes was, Yeah, but were trying to insert this grounded element instead of just having fun. Maybe this is a fun episode. And maybe the amount of twists that we have in the first act needs to create this parabolic curve of [Sings, speeding up with each one.] da-da-daaaa. Da-da-daaaa, da-da-daaaa, da-da-daaaa, da-da-daaaaaa, da-da-daaaaaaaaa! Until da-da-daaaa loses its meaning. That was a beautiful epiphany, because it was a pure one. I have no regrets about that episode. I watched that one again recently only because I was showing the animator who was going to make the animated tag for the end of the clip show, I was taking him through the deans character. And for that reason alone, I did something I never do, which was to go back and watch an episode before the DVD commentary. Because I dont. I just freak out about it. So I went back and watched it with this guy, who had better things to do. Im just supposed to be showing him the dean, you know? We were both just enthralled. That episode is gorgeous, Adam Davidson shot it beautifully, and Ludwig, I just cant overstate. And Joe Russo also deserves a tip of the hat there, because it wasnt just Ludwig in a vacuum. It was Joe Russo sort of annoying the fuck out of Ludwig. Joe got on board that episode, and was over there with Ludwig really getting to this very American concept of the thriller score. Ludwig is this genius from Sweden. Theres just certain pop-cultural vocabularies that dont exist [for him] that we share [in the U.S.]. I didnt know at any step of the way that that thing was going to be good or bad. If the people that shovel money into the show could see how many times I had no idea whether the final product was going to be good or bad, theywell, I guess they do have the ability to see that, and they react appropriately, which is to mistrust me completely. [Laughs.] It feels like I cant be right that many times; it has to be because Im making the appropriate decision every step of the way to do what is probably philosophically prudent. Sometimes that means, Just wait a second, hold on, just see this through. Sometimes, that means freak out and flail and stop everything. But more often than not, its about being like water and just assuming the answer is yes to whatever anyone says, but just subtly always committing to your tastes in a way that creates this river that flows. Conspiracy Theories is Chris McKenna. Hes such a relatively unsung hero because hes higher-ranking, and he precisely makes less of a splash because of his stability and his experience. Hes like 6-foot-4, hardened salt of the earth, American Dad writer that believes in keeping his head down and toeing the line, and he loves the show. And every episode that he writes, he produces as well. He frets over details that even I have outgrown fretting about. He was the first writer Id ever employed in the first season that ever called me at 9 p.m. worrying about something that I heard myself say, Its just a sitcom, man. [Laughs.] The night before we shot [the third act], I had to run down the hall, tell the line producer how many guns we needed and what kind they should be, and then I had to get on the phone with Standards And Practices, who thank God, we have a good relationship with,

and talk her through the concept, because we needed that clearance before we committed a word to paper, when youre working down to the wire like that. So I had this conversation with her about, Look, theres guns. They look real; theyre gonna sound real, then theres gonna be some squibs, blood packs, all the stuff. I just walked her through it beat by beat. Then the end of it with Craig Cackowski coming in and saying, Guns arent toys. She goes, Thank you for adding that at the end. It sounds like overall, no ones going to come away with the idea that guns are a fun thing to screw around with. [Laughs.] Shes really cool, and I was actually able to clear it with S&P and then go write it with the writers, and we shot it the next day. And yet you cant tell from watching the episode that it was assembled like that. That the pitch was the first act, we improvised the second act, and then came up with the third act the day before. You would think that there would be some kind of awkwardness to that episode for that reason. AVC: This is the one with the blanket fort chase, where the A- and B-stories intersect in a very strange way. Where did that idea come from? DH: I wanna say McKenna, too, but that might just be because McKenna was pointman on the episode. I dont know if someone else came up with that idea or if it was Chris, but it wasnt me. The idea of those guys making a blanket fort together that became the size of a cityI cant remember. [Long pause.] There were so many permutations of it. There was supposed to be this whole French Connection-like chase sequence that you could see represented, but as is often the case, it was this vision that we have that you cant do. To me, thats another example of, like, thats a normal episode. Cant we just do that every week? Does that have to be called a conceptual episode? Does that have to be called a departure, because isnt that just a story about Jeff trying to fudge his grades and Annie trying to appeal to his responsibility and Troy and Abed doing a goofy thing together? How different is that from an episode of My Name Is Earl, except for the fact that we, I dont know, think differently? So if you go, Well, you did too many conceptual episodes this year, okay. Is that one of em? Like, which ones are the normal ones? How many of those normal ones do you want? Because I can only think of a couple normal ones, and I just hate them.

Mixology Certification (Dec. 2, 2010) It's Troy's 21st birthday, and the group goes to the bar to celebrate, though Troy ends up doing the least celebrating of all. AVC: This one ended up being surprisingly controversial. For a lot of our commenters, it wasnt funny enough and was too depressing. DH: And [they said] it felt like an anti-drinking message somehow in there. Theres no bigger drunk than me. Im drinking a glass of vodka while I talk to you about this. Im not Trey Parker. I dont wanna just assume that the way I live my life and the things that I believe need to be somehow imparted to people. Thats easier with Trey because hes a libertarian, and his views are more neutral. I cant get away with that, because my views are left of Chomsky, and my habits are left of Belushi. I cant just suggest that

America get into what Im into. So in an episode about everybody getting shit-faced, I was the one going, Lets not glamorize it. Lets make sure that if you dont drink, you walk away from the episode not thinking maybe youre missing something. [Laughs.] But at the same time, if you do, youre going, Finally, an episode for me. And it was another based on the rush I got from the bottle episode, which at the time had yet to be shot. The production code on that is 209, so thats right after the bottle episode in terms of the order were writing it. I guess I was just in a phase of really believing in this idea of making a show about these people, and we can still be clever and fun about it, but that doesnt mean you have to do dragons and zombies and stuff. So part of it is like, how do you do another bottle episode? So that must be why we flopped the order of it, cause it felt like two bottle episodes in a row, almost. We must have taken [Conspiracy Theories And Interior Design] and stuck it in between. But thats one of my favorite episodes. I saw the first cut of that and was practically ready to ship it. I wanted to start growing Troy up. I wanted to establish a calendar in subtle ways. I think that was also about saving money. I think maybe Sony had sat me down at some point around this time and said, Youre $700,000 over budget, and we have only done six episodes, and I said, I told you that was gonna happen, because we were gonna come out swinging, because Big Bang Theorys coming, and they said, We know; youre right, but get back down to zero. And I think that the bottle episode and Mixology and stuff were all a part of that. The bar that we used was a pre-existing set from Happy Endings, the show the Russo brothers were working on, so we redecorated their bar and shot in there, so it was a very cheap thing to do. Not funny enough I was surprised at that response. I was a little less surprised by the suspicion that I was somehow doing an after-school special about how drinking is bad, because I was like, Well, thats probably a good thing, right? If you spend an afternoon with me, youre going to be more of a drunk walking away. I have the opposite influence on the world around me, so it wouldnt be a terrible thing to spend a half hour of my primetime sitcom accidentally giving the impression that its not that great a thing to get shitfaced. But the jokes, I thought, were there. The cold open of that episode is one of my proudest little diamonds. I mean, coming in on them halfway through the birthday song, and its just a setup, punchline, one-liner, one-liner, oneliner, setup, punchline, punchline. And I remember one of the notes on that from the studio was, I dont understand why theyre going out drinking. Because Troys turning 21. Yeah, but why does that mean they have to go out drinking? I dont know, man. That just goes to show you that one of the inherent problems of the old world of television, which is that 1 percent of the country is controlling what 99 percent sees. And I think, in their world, on your 21st birthday, your pony gets a different haircut. [Laughs.] Everyone else knows that when the government says they wont throw you in jail for drinking anymore, you go out and you get drunk in public. AVC: A lot of the impression that it wasnt funny enough may have come when the final act skews away from the hard jokes and more into character drama. DH: Yeah. It was a departure from the strictest tenets of my story structure. The story, for all intents and purposes, was resolved at the end of act two. Yet we have an

extended third act that is its own event. I really liked that, too. It made me feel like I was watching an episode of Taxi. They would have a dark but familial feel to some complicated situation, but very often, in the last leg, Danny DeVito would humanize, and everything would get quiet. And there would be stretches between the audience laughing, and it would be just odd and interesting, and it would make you go, Ah, I cant wait until the next episode. Are these guys gonna get their shit together or what? It wasnt an homage in that sense; that was just something I noticed as it was coming together. I was like, This is beautiful to me the way Taxi was when I was a kid. The real thing that was being expressed there was that this is what drinking is. This is the ride home. This is the asymmetry of an evening. We get excited, and we have adventures, and we get high. Then theres this shameful, quiet, dark, odd, clumsy, tearstained kind of like, We did all that stuff, and its over. And I just wanted that stuff to feel like it feels and feel a way that it doesnt in other sitcoms, where drinking is a potion that you take, and then you go crazy. Were all familiar with that joke. You drink and then you have a lampshade on your head and your dick is out. Then you dont remember anything, and then you wake up, and you put the steak on your head, and Fred Flintstone takes you bowling. Not drawing the division line there, but drawing on the ride home and dropping people off, walking them to their door. Troy and Annie never having talked since Ive never seen those two relate as high-school classmates growing up. The most important part of your college life is shedding your high-school skin, going through these outwardly childish experiences. You stop learning very quickly, after the first couple years of college. Your personality is set. All kinds of crazy shits gonna happen to you, but its gonna be crazy shit happening to some guy. Its not gonna be a person forming, coming out of this chrysalis. And Annie and Troy are different from the rest of the cast in that sense. Theyre changing every week. Not only did Troy envy grown-ups in the beginning and end up driving them home and parenting them, but he walked his sister to the door and was capable of being attracted to her, appreciative of her, and responsible for her, all without any objectification of her. It was an epiphany. Those are the kinds of things that happen in good summer teen movies from my youth, too. Even movies with titles like Fraternity Pussy Paradise always had some weird third act where the guy from Fright Night has a monologue about how hard it is to be unpopular or something, as the sun comes up behind him. Bachelor Party with Tom Hanks had an odd energy to it in the third act, where the sun starts to crest the horizon and theres, like, solitude. The best part of all was Jeff and Britta making out and then Abed sitting there. [Laughs.] I cant think of a better show than that. And like, somebodys sleeve or elbow flicks against his face and hes just sitting here. And then theres the pause, and he says, They were making out. And you think, Oh, were gonna make a will they, wont they situation out of this, but No, fuck you. He just tells them. And they yell at him, like, Why would you do that in front of me? Im not a coat rack. [Laughs.] Theres not a single person in that car whos a hero or a villain. Theres nobody in that car thats a sidekick. Theres just a bunch of people in that car getting closer and closer and more and more tangled and realizing there are all these different hats that you have to wear all the time. Troys driving Jeffs new Lexus, and Jeff is saying, Happy birthday. Youre a man, now, and its like handing a curse off to him. Britta is sort of attracted to him.

Hes nutting up and maybe shes making out with the wrong guy, and its all through that Vaseline-coated lens of drunken stupor. I love it.

Abeds Uncontrollable Christmas (Dec. 9, 2010) An incident leaves Abed perceiving the world as stop-motion animated on the brink of the holiday season. DH: The nature of that episode is, we had to squeeze it into a schedule in order for there to be room for it. Thats why I have a credit on it. Theres not a single writer in this building that I could justify burdening with the actual writing of the draft. It was clerical work and had to be done by a body over weekends, and I wouldnt wish that on my worst enemy, because we were already so busy. [Co-writer] Dino [Stamatopoulos] is a consultant on the show. He gets paid very little, and hes my friend, and so this was all how I could justify it to the brass. I just said, It will be as if the episode doesnt exist. No writer will be taken off of work for it. No other episode will be delayed. There will be no extra hiatus. You wont even know anything happened, because my drinking buddy and I, who we barely pay anything, who plays Starburns, well just fart it off on the side. And Dino produced probably 50 percent of the grunt work on that. He had to write the first draft, and then I rewrote it, and we basically shot it. Its important to note that before Dino and I really dug in, I had a two-hour window with the entire writing staff. I said to [executive producer] Neil [Goldman], I know I promised you we wouldnt take any time with this episode, but just let me talk to them for a couple hours. All the writers in the room that were available just talked conceptually. I said, Everybody keep your minds open. Heres the dilemma. Why are we doing a stop-motion episode? If its because its detached from the canon, then theres so little satisfaction doing it at all. On the other hand, you ground it enough that it can be canon, why is it stop-motion? This is gonna be a stop-motion episode about doing homework? Thats still masturbation. So how do we get out of that? And we talked about it for two hours. And somehow, collectively, we found that concept: Abeds mind. The way Abed sees things. Abed undergoing a trauma that has resulted in the medium being the way it is, and that being the inciting incident. The awareness of it. Getting to the bottom of it through the exploration of it. That will justify all of the visual splendor, but it will be as grounded as anything, because it will be depressingly rooted in a very human experience. So it had to be two hours, tops, that we went from zero idea of what to do, to that. And thats everything. From then on, it was all incredibly hard, sweaty, thankless, shitty work with me and Dino with a blackboard going, Whats that story? But its also the most important decision that was made in two hours. Thats why it makes sense. I remember Dino and I breaking all these stories. I remember there was this little elf girl. There was a visit to Duncans office where you actually meet all the broken toys outside the hallway. Christmas is a booming time for Duncan because of all the suicide attempts and thoughts and things, and theres this little redhead elf girl out in the hallway who Abed befriends, and he indoctrinates her into the ability to willfully deny reality and just engage in this fascination. It just got too fucking dark. [Laughs.] Because she ended up killing herself again or attempting it. And it was like, Oh my God, there was no way. I cant even watch this. So that may help explain why that episode seems kind of dark

and depressing. You have no idea. That episode is Brady Bunch compared to what we were starting with. Were drinking buddies. Were old, were dark. We love depression. We think its hilarious and fun and profound, and were comfortable with it. The two of us in a room together, we could have put something together that would have been an actual crime against television. The nature of that medium is [as you] write the script, they have to be recording it. [Snaps fingers.] The animation is backed to the recording of the voices. You can ADR if you dont like their inflection, but their lip sync is their lip sync. They do it to the original recording. That script had to be final. Unlike any other script, theres no time to go through and go, Hey, what if he said Got milk? as hes falling off the milk? [Laughs.] I have a feeling that that would have resulted in a fantastic piece of television, if we had also been able to have Chris McKenna and Megan Ganz and Adam Countee and Andrew Guest sitting around a table with a sad, sweet, awesome journey into Abeds dementia. It would have been a Smithsonian-worthy piece of video. As it is, it was better to do it than not do it. As with the zombie episode, never gonna get this chance again. I was lamenting [to my girlfriend], going Im an idiot; why do I keep doing these things just to do them? This episodes not funny. It sucks. Everyones waiting for me to fail, and I finally did them a favor. And she told me about Charles Schultz and how hard he had to fight for the Peanuts Christmas special. He was the one proposing it from the beginning. Hes going, This things gonna be depressing. Christmas is a depressing holiday. And he was the one saying, I want them to sound like real kids, but I want em to talk like adults and I want it to depress the fuck out of you like Christmas sometimes does, but ultimately having a spiritually uplifting sense. And they wanted to burn him at the stake. Here was a guy that had done a Christmas special and had a much harder time than I had. So it really relaxed me. Eh, Im no hero, and Im no villain, and Im nothing. I just want to make a Christmas episode that reminds me of those days.

Asian Population Studies (Jan. 20, 2011) Troy accidentally reveals that Shirley's baby may be Chang's. The group gathers to consider possible new additions to the study group. DH: Theres one where its obviously a normal episode. So that one should be held up in approaching any debate where the show should be watered down, weirded out, or a combination of the two, because I assume everyone can recognize that episode as normal. And I dont look at it and cringe. I dont think its bad. I would not be ashamed of myself if that were broadcasting every week. Cause its got one of my favorite jokes, which is people coming into the bathroom and arguing, and Brittas the last one in, and Fat Neil comes in. He comes in and gives her a look and she lifts up her shirt, and he gives her two concert tickets and walks out. [Laughs.] And she looks at them and says, Mezzanine! And thats like, the tent-pole between her and the beginning, she says, Shirley, this is what guys do. They come back into your life. Sometimes its Chili Pepper tickets, sometimes its soft-serve ice cream, and yes, Ill admit it, one time it was a gym bag full of nickels, but the point is. [Laughs.]

Anyway, that makes me laugh hard enough that I could do a show like that. I would certainly be home earlier. If I married my girlfriend and had kids, theyd be happier. Theyd have more of a dad if we just decided now, Let every episode be like that. Okay, Ill barely be here. Ill name a successor, and Ill go develop other stuff thats easier. Ill reexamine that. Take a look at that episode. I dont know if you read that Atlantic analysis of the show. I was fascinated by it the whole time. Hes writing this in-depth analysis of the show, and his thesis is Is Community too clever and meta to stick around? And hes pointing out How I Met Your Mother as an example of something thats sort of like a line drive up the middle and is succeeding. And Im like, How am I supposed to write How I Met Your Mother knowing that someone like you is watching? Look at this article! [Laughs.] Dont you think How I Met Your Mother is telling you to go fuck yourself? Like, how many essays have you written about it? And arent there more of you out there? And its a big question. Like, are you supposed to assume that the audience is critical and invested? Or are you making a fundamental error there in a medium that is not designed to engage, but to comfort? Because youre a critic. If you do work 12 hours a day, youre just working on, like, watching TV. Or something that is not digging ditches. Something where you arent going to the TV for, like, an ice pack. Youre going to it for a Popsicle. Youre going to it for flavor and for engagement. So you have that spectrum of HBO on one end and ABC on the other end, and you get these huge numbers of people going, Hey! Dont assume anything about my IQ, but I got work in the morning, and Ive got better things to think about than the concept of entertainment. Charlie Sheen just made me laugh with a boner joke. Done! He reminds me of me. He likes his slippers. Hes got amnesia in this episode. Its not an easy debate. Like, are you supposed to engage in fucking art on TV? Is there a way to do both? But Asian Population Studies, thats as mainstream as Community can get, I think. Celebrity Pharmacology 212 (Jan. 27, 2011) The group puts on an anti-drug play to educate some kids, but Pierce's desire for attention backfires and leaves the kids with the wrong message. Dan Harmon: It probably started as something simple, like, We havent done a Pierce story in a while. Honestly, I have no idea, its just another one of these episodes where partway into it, I start going, What are we really doing? And the goal becomes to just get through it. I think there was an element in there at one point where we were going to mirror Chevy [Chase]s biography in a strange way, not in an obnoxious way, but hopefully in a profound way. That this play for kids was actually going to mirror Saturday Night Lives first season. [Laughs.] Thats why theres bee costumes involved, because the legend is when Chevy returned to host Saturday Night Live in its second season, he and Bill Murray got into a fistfight backstage that a killer-bee-clad John Belushi had to break up and shove Chevy out for his monologue. And that you could see Chevy coming out, kind of being pushed out, or that he was just in fisticuffs with Bill Murray because of something he said. These legends, probably none of them are true, but that is why there are bees. I think we were going to build to some kind of weird scuffle backstage.

But at some point, those bits start to reveal themselves as having no actual value. They betray you. You go, How much harder are we going to work to contrive this? And whats the pot of gold? And then unfortunately, sometimes in those situations, abandoning that lofty, intriguing concept, youre now hip-deep in a Small Wonder episode about a childrens drug play gone awry because somebodys a stage hog. The only thing noteworthy about that episode, in my opinion, is how touching it feels for Chevy to be near Alison [Brie], which I never would have predicted on paper. If you had pitched me the idea of him being a fatherly mentor to her, I would have worried that there might be a lecherous vibe to it, because Alison is so coveted. She brings the lupine qualities out of all of us. I saw them in that scene together where hes writing her the check, and I was like, Wow, we have arrived at a lot of goals that I talked about at the beginning of the season. Weve got this character revealing shes living above the dildo store, and weve got a relationship forming between those two that is the furthest thing from sexual, but is completely real and resonant and interesting. The rest of the episode is fine. Neil [Goldman] has this expression that he introduced me to in the first season after a 70 percenter. He says, Its pizza, meaning, Bad slice? Good slice? Like, [Nasal voice.] Ehh, pizzas good food. We make pizza. And thats a good way of looking at it. Community is pizza, as compared to having to eat shit, you know? Thats a different meal entirely; thats bad. And you can have a bad slice of pizza, and you can have a really good slice of pizza, but its important to fall back on the comfort of going, We make pizza. People like pizza. Its greasy, and its gooey, and its crispy, and we do it right. Sometimes, we dont redefine fucking television with every slice. My problems with that episode are the kinds of problems that people never notice in the episodes that they love that I secretly dont like. Its structure stuff. Theres no story being told there. There are too many double beats. How many times are we going to establish that this guy wants more than he has? I tried to incorporate revelations about his father and backstory and stuff. [Sighs.] One interesting footnote about that episode is that thats the episode that was about to air when we were writing the Dinner With Andre episode. And Im pretty sure the only reason we didnt get a federal injunction filed against us to keep us from shooting Dinner With Andre is because there was no table-read for the Andre episode. And when we were handing in the pages that were about to be shot, when peoples alarms should be going off because theyre seeing six-page monologues about Cougar Town, at that exact time, everyone was embroiled in this ridiculous pissing contest about the editing of this episode. Specifically, a Sony executive really wanted me to just cut the entire end of the first act, where you see Chevy watching the old commercial for the moist towelettes. Im not going to sit here and say that that scene makes that episode Citizen Kane, but when you start cutting out everything weird from the episode, I start to get really depressed, because there aint much left to it, except a glimpse that connects you aesthetically from Space Bus, where the Colonel Sanders figure is antagonizing Chevys claustrophobically antagonized mind, and the magic trampoline where hes saying Father, to episodes like 214, 215. Theres a story happening here. If we can do one thing with a lukewarm episode, can we plant a weird one-off scene in the canon of the show, so when youre watching it in 2020 on DVD, you go, Thats cool? Do we have to cut that out? Is that going to make the show get a 2.3 instead of a 1.5 [rating]? Its not.

Its hard to argue, then, in favor of macro-serialization of your characters arc and stuff when people just want to cut the scene because it feels weird to them. But the beautiful result of that was that there were so many conference calls about the editing of that, and there were so many arguments and so much politicking and so many alliances changing, that meanwhile, we were writing a My Dinner With Andre episode. Nobody knew we were shooting. They didnt know. I cant believe that they did know, or they would have told us to stop. But other than that, what is that episode? Its cute. Its got some funny moments.

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (Feb. 3, 2011) The group gets together to play a game of Dungeons & Dragons to help depressed fellow student Fat Neil. DH: I played D&D when I was a kid, and Im more familiar with it than most people are with poker. So its the same reason that people on other shows are pitching, Lets do a whole episode where its just Paul Reiser and Norm Macdonald watching a Lakers game. Or these guys are fixing a car in their driveway, and the whole episode is theyre fixing their car. Whatever you have a relationship with, you realize the potential for it story-wise. For me, its Dungeons & Dragons. The closest analogy is poker. What I kept saying is that when theyre playing poker in The Odd Couple, I dont know anything about poker. Its not whats important. And arguably, I think Dungeons & Dragons is a more accessible game than poker, because there are all these weird arbitrary rules about what beats a straight flush, but there are no arbitrary rules about if you take someones sword and rape their family. Thats worse than if you dont. So I always wanted to do a Dungeons & Dragons episode. I knew that we had predecessors there. I knew that The IT Crowd did one. I knew that Freaks And Geeks did one. I saw that what all those had in common was, number one, they bounced back and forth from the actual game to other stories, and also that the joke, the conceit was that its a nerdy game, and thats the whole point. I wanted to just fade into the group playing the game, and how do you tell a story that way? That was another case of the writers blowing my socks off, because I gave them a Rubiks cube of a quandary. I said, Make a game of Dungeons & Dragons. And none of these other people even played the fucking game. I came to the lot with this milk crate of books from when I was 15. I plopped them down on the table and I said, You dont have to start reading this stuff, but flip through the pages and see if you figure out a way that there could be stakes in Dungeons & Dragons, the way that Jeff and Britta fucked in [Modern Warfare]. And they fucking nailed it. It was all while I was out of the room, somebody coming up with these Fat Neil concepts they equated with Saving Private Ryan. The idea of this stranger you didnt know being the point of this whole thing, and somehow that being even more important. I remember Megan [Ganz] coming to the fore in the third act, and really being invested in these concepts of How do we break this third act? What is it that happens? How do you beat Evil Pierce, who has the power of a dragon? And coming up with concepts ranging from, Well, he seals them in a cube that they cant get out of, so in the game, they start creating a game called Dungeons & Dragons where they start playing their own game sealed in the cube, and hes not allowed in it in the confines of his own game

unless he unseals the cube. That got simplified to I use my turn to feel sorry for you. [Laughs.] That was great. Chris McKenna and Andrew Guest and I spent two days in a row on that script, first at my place, and then we moved over to Andrews place. It was a 48-hour, three-man working of that script, finding the final points of the story and stuff. It was in those final hours that I came up with the idea that Pierce could cheat by getting hold of the actual adventure that they were playing and stuff like that. Youve got Christmas, and youve got Dungeons & Dragons as the major political plot points in the making of Communitys second season. I was asked not to write the episode, they said Because it wont be an accessible topic. I said, I appreciate your concern, Ill make it accessible. This was the studio, not the network. We spent two days writing it, and we finished it, and we read it through, these two gentlemen and I at Andrew Guests house. His girlfriend made us Pop-Tarts and we had a little shot of cognac or something. Wed been up all night. We almost cried because we were like, God, that was fucking hard. And it was so satisfying. What a nice little story this is. Lets get to that table-read. And we did it. We threaded the needle. We made Dungeons & Dragons accessible. We went and table-read it, and it was a great tableread, people loved it. The director, Joe Russo, was like, I cant wait to shoot it. I dont have any thoughts about how to improve it. I think its great. The studio and network response at the table-read was so removed from that. They were so upset about the crime of this episode having been written. The note session as a whole was preceded by a 45-minute period of them walking around the lot whispering to each other. They told me they would come up to my office and meet me privately. When they came up, I had the director and all of the writers in the office with me, because I was terrified. They sat down, and they said, Look, where do we start? I couldnt believe this was happening. I was like, This is opposite of how you should feel right now. This is a great episode. Were going to get a 1.7 no matter what. We will build our ratings in other ways. The episode is not about credit cards; its not about Hilary Duff. Its going to get the same numbers. There is a cultural build to a hit show. We have to prove to people that were capable of good things so they can trust us, so that we can have a relationship. One day we will either be a highly rated show or well be cancelled. It will not have to do with this moment. This episode is good, the story is good, these characters are good. Anyone who doesnt tune in because the commercial says theyre playing Dungeons & Dragons, its not my fault. Its not on me. It was such a depressing note session, because they didnt even have any notes on the story. They just didnt want it to exist. I took a photograph of my eyes driving home that day at 3 p.m. because I was leaving work early. I looked in my rearview mirror, and I was crying. More than crying, I was red-eyes, tears streaming, weeping. And I was weeping out of self-pity and frustration, like a child weeps when he doesnt understand his parents rules. Why cant I have ice cream when I ate my liver? I took a photo of it, so I could show it to them between seasons, because as I told my girlfriend when I got home, I think Im going to have to quit my own show, because I cant operate under these circumstances. I cant be this proud of something that the people paying me to do it are this ashamed of. It will never work. Well never achieve anything. Itll never connect. So it was the best of times and the worst of times. I think that episode is fantastic. I havent watched it again, but I remember it as being something else. I invite

people over to my house to watch the episodes with me on Thursday night that Im really proud of, and that was definitely one of them.

Early 21st Century Romanticism (Feb. 10, 2011) Three small stories take us through a Valentine's Day at Greendale, as Jeff reaffirms his commitment to the group and Britta believes she's friends with a lesbian. The A.V. Club: It felt like there hadnt been a lot for Britta to do until that episode. How do you balance out which characters get what kind of storylines? DH: Its pretty base logic. We try to keep our eye on it. We just try to say, Well, its been a couple of episodes since weve done anything with so-and-so. The thing that terrifies us is the day we get comfortable going, Well, that character, fuck her. When I think about Britta, I rub my hands together and roll up my sleeves and be like, Oh, is it her turn? Because I dont even have an idea, but I already know its going to be fun. And I want to feel that way about every single one of those people. We try to do a rotation, really, but theres no real system to it yet. Weve got seven characters played by seven sophisticated, high-comedy-IQ weapons. We try to find different combinations and try to give them all screen time. Then theres other random things that happen where you go, Well, this story bumps with that story, and actually, are you thinking what Im thinking? Yeah, now that were breaking this story, it actually sounds like this character whos going up and down the beanstalk should be Jack, not Jill. Jill should go up a hill. It comes from structural things, that you go, Well, this characters having these things happening to him, wouldnt it be more profound if this was Annie? So sometimes that stuff happens. The lesbian thing, Im pretty sure that had to be driven from the outset from Karey real-life lesbian Dornetto. I talked about it with her a lot, this concept of the straight girl who wants to hang out with this girl who thinks shes a lesbian, and meanwhile, the other girl thinks that this straight girl is a lesbian. Its adorable, the concept. Its so perfectly Britta. That was easy pickings. The original concept was that we were going to do this crazy Love Actually kind of thing in the spirit of these holiday movies, or Hes Just Not That Into You, these romantic comedies with these casts of thousands. The original concept was to decidedly be fragmented with our storytelling. Its Valentines Day, and were just going to do these rapid-fire stories. Well, one of our characters was pregnant and repairing her relationship with her husband. With Troy and Abed, it was easy; lets do a love triangle. I said, Lets make it a librarian, because some librarian tweeted me on Twitter, and I want to feel capricious and improvisational about it. It will blow that persons mind when they see a hot librarian as they requested on Twitter. But then with Jeff, it was like, Well, whats he going to do, fall in love with some outside stranger? Somewhere along the line it became, Well, this is a story about Jeffs relationship with the group. I decided that its halfway through season two. We will never go backward from this. Jeff will be in love with the group now. After this, youll barely be able to tell the difference, but hell never again have the relationship with the group on the table for

negotiation. It will only be prices having to be paid for committing to that relationship, whether he likes it or not. So this must be the episode where he says he loves them. So I guess that means, as in a typical rom-com, its preceded with him experimenting with not loving them, and cheating on them, in fact. In the end, its pizza. Theres a lot of great elements of it. Again, structurally, its not much of a story. Whats he doing? Hes watching soccer instead of going to the dance. All right. Whats Changs deal? Okay, Chang, turns out, just wants to move in with him. Its all good. Its fine. I remember there was a complication in there somewhere. This is the Pierce complication. There was this original plan that we were going to trace his addiction to painkillers from the moment he broke his legs in Trampoline, and then we were going to have him go down a rocky road with pills, culminating in the hospital episode. But it was built around this idea that Chevy had asked for a week off in there. So wed built a whole thing around this thing, so we were like, Week off to Chevy, thats great. We can build a story around that. And so thats why hes unconscious on a park bench at the end of Valentines Day. The idea is that the next episode would have been the only episode without Pierce in it at all. That he would be missing, and then they would find him and then go to the hospital. We were breaking those stories about him being missing when Chevy found out the reason we were so gung-ho about him taking a week off is because we wouldnt have to pay him. Then his agents wanted to be paid for the week he was gone, and we were like, Were not fucking paying you not to be here. So everything fell apart, and we just jumped from Valentines Day to Hes in the hospital and stuff. Thats unfortunate. Thats why Im reticent about planning ahead. Im going to next season, but when you make plans, youre a hostage of everybody thats unpredictable. When youre unpredictable, youre Osama bin Laden, Now I get to say when the destruction happens. So Ill try to be Obama next year. Face those demons down, harness that chaos. Valentines Day. Tiny Andy Dick. We had all these lofty goals. Because when Pierce takes his pills, he sees the tiny man in the Quadrocopter. I dont know. It all seems like misfires to me. All seems like stuff that started with these inspired pieces of passion that all suffered the erosion of reality and schedules, and not being able to get Sam Elliott, and that kind of stuff. [Laughs.]

Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking (Feb. 17, 2010) Pierce's troubles with pain killers (and a night on a park bench) land him in the hospital. Abed makes a documentary about the groups time there. AVC: A lot of critics have wondered why the group would still be friends with Pierce after this string of episodes. Whats your answer to that? DH: I think they just felt responsible for him. I didnt see it the way that other people saw it. Like, I have a lot of friends who are incredibly high-maintenance. In the Dungeons & Dragons episode, he is ditched by the group. He busts them ditching him, and he creates a ruckus that ultimately saves a kids life. So I just never really saw it the way other people saw it, until they started proclaiming it so profusely. And its like,

Okay, the customer is always right. I never knew the character was loveable, or had the ability to be loveable. I always just saw him as a dick and a test of other peoples humanity. I feel like there is a heroic quality in non-redemptiveness there that at least gives the character the opportunity to have some backbone. But Im not really interested in selling a fake Griswold grandpa character whos kinda racist and sleepy. I mean, wheres the story? Someone pitch me a better storyline to do with a character like that. I totally respect peoples right to ask, Why would they hang out with him? And it became my goal to answer that question, at the time, but at this point that youre describing, I wasnt perceiving this as a problem. If you asked me at this point, I wouldnt have had an answer. My answer would have been, What do you mean? Is there a problem here? Why are any of them hanging out with each other? The answer is the same across the board, right? Is that a question, or is that the answer? You are hanging out with him and you have been for a while. Hes like the shitty member of your family. Its like a sweater thread, and when you start pulling it, its like, Why the fuck are you friends with anyone youre friends with? Thats how I would have responded at the time. And when this episode aired, I saw the comments section, and the audience was divided into two groups. One thought that Pierce being such a dick made the show unwatchable, and the other said No, they have a plan. And I was like, There seems to be a consensus here, and its not really my right to say that there isnt one. I need to have a plan that this other group is talking about, so thats the direction I went. But at the time that that episode was being created, all I was thinking was, Okay, lets create a good story and further this character. And keeping with the character, I just kept thinking, What are his vulnerabilities and his desires? How come they havent stopped hanging out with him? Like, dont you have a ton of friends who just drive you nuts? Like, Oh shit, its fucking Sue on the phone again. And you just roll your eyes. But its not Survivor, you cant just vote her off the island. The guy is there every day. He goes to your school. Whats the protocol? And I made those questions nonrhetorical in the last few episodes. Its the best I could do. I dont want to be guilty. Like maybe I have a neurological disorder that makes it impossible for me to think what other people are thinking about a character, so I just had to go with the people on this one. AVC: Single-camera sitcoms are really popular, and thats the style you adopted for this episode. Did you see this episode as a critique of that style? DH: I just wanted to do it to see what it was like. You know, to take those weights off our ankles. I feel like 30 Rock and Community never get an award for doing a format thats twice as hard. Because it really is twice as hard. Not only can you not lay in a voiceover, sort of explaining what people are doing and how they feel, but on top of that, you are combining all of the crutches that come from flashbacks and jumping around in time and multiple points of view. I wanted to do it and verify that it actually is easier to make an episode funnier using that format. And the answer is, yeah, it is. I mean, there were a lot of jokes in the episode, and it just seemed faster, like we were able to fire off more and pack more into it. Everybody has a little story, and it moved fast. Its a bummer that we found that out, and now we have to go back to playing the violin while they play stickball. But I like our show the way it is.

AVC: And you launched the story of Jeffs dad in this episode. Will that be coming back into play in future seasons? DH: Yeah, definitely. I want you to be able to go back and say, See! three years from now. And I dont have any definitive plans. I dont erect statues; I erect pylons. This marks the site. There are plans for a whole bridge there, and those pylons are farther apart than say, an arc about Troy being good at plumbing because thats a plan for a larger bridge that will have more traffic on it. And thats basically all I can say, not because Im trying to be coy, but because thats all I really know. I just want to make sure that theres a tree in that orchard.

Intro To Political Science (Feb. 24, 2011) Greendale holds an impromptu election to elect a student body president on the brink of Vice President Biden's arrival on campus. AVC: That reintroduced the Jeff and Annie thing. How do you feel about building those romantic storylines? DH: I try to just be willfully ignorant of it. I know that they have chemistry and I guess thats just another pylon. Like you go, Okay, lets just get them in a room together. I feel like theres a curse on that story, because believe it or not, we tried to do that story in the first season, but it became Chicken Fingers. The story is very loosely inspired by the Robert Redford movie The Candidate. Its supposed to be about politics without being partisan. Its like a shining candidate being coached by society to make the changes required to start winning, just to discover that after you win, you are nothing. You are just a winner. That was, believe it or not, what the script was for the Chicken Fingers episode. There was a chicken-finger shortage, and Jeff got Troy installed as the manager of the cafeteria menu, and Troy became a very powerful figure for the people, and Jeff was his Karl Rove, and there was a conflict between them having to do with Jeff being the puppetmaster and not letting Troy grow up. And so we table-read the episode, and it was terrible. So in a flurry of frustration, it suddenly became this Scorsese thing about Abed. But a year later, I was like, Lets go back to that fight that we lost that one time. Ive got armor on now. Lets kick some ass. But God, thats like our fucking Vietnam, that concept. It just never happened again. So we bailed again, and the easiest bail was Jeff and Annie. And I think that was spurred on by the original concept, which was Jeff coaching Troy to run against Annie. So the breakdown happened when we were just like, Why isnt Jeff just getting up there? Its too hard to coach somebody. Well, because he feels above it; he doesnt care about politics. But really, of course, he cares about politics; hes just a hypocrite. So he gets up there and runs against Annie himself. We very cynically and lazily did say, Okay, we dont have the time to break this story any better than that, but Jeff and Annie will be onscreen together. And we arent jaded about that. It just came to us in the 11th hour in order to break the story. I would never take advantage of anyones proclivities for shipping or anything like that, but we had that going for us. You know, those kids are cute together. Lets just make it like Tracy

and Hepburn up there, less of a story and more of a romp. Lets get as many podiums up there as possible and get all these characters in here, and it just wont be a story-driven episode, it will be like The Muppet Show, sort of a playground. Its almost a bottle episode in a lot of ways. That might be stretching the definition, but it takes place mostly in the cafeteria.

Custody Law And Eastern European Diplomacy (March 17, 2011) Britta is interested in Troy and Abed's new friend, a student from the Balkans named Luka who may be hiding a dark past. DH: That happened somewhere in the gravity zone of the Andre episode. There is a good chance that while that episode was being written, I was tangling with one of the most terrifying things of the season, which is this Dinner With Andre thing. And you can bet that if 215 is a tongue-in-cheek homage to the mockumentary style, then 217 is Wait, what was 216? The election one? Jeez. There was just a glut of these, and they were all rushed. The election one was all slapped together in panic, and there is a cycle that happens when you fall behind on one. Then it pushes them all back, and you are behind on everything. You just do a frantic dogpaddle to get to the closest edge, and you beg for an extra hiatus from the studio, but that involves them writing a check for like, $275,000 to tell everyone to just go take a break for a week while the writers catch up. And even when you get those, somehow the week doesnt even matter that much. You just get into a space thats like, Whats a week gonna do? You almost need a week off, not just a week where they arent shooting. And if you dont get that, you become native to the Vietnam of having to make 50 decisions a day, and you can only make each one once. Its like a thousand dice rolling all at once. You dont have time to second-guess yourself or think about anything. So yeah, 217 is Chang coming out of the air vent in the end, just another example of scripts being written the day before they are shooting them, and its slapped together. Its not a favorite of mine either. These are the things that get Bs in The Onion and 75s in Paste. You arent supposed to write for critics, but Im walking out of those tapings and going Ehh, C+. So then everyone else says so, too. Your fans are your base, your support. You go home and they are all tweeting, This is the best episode ever. I love this, and Im so grateful of that. But I know they really only have two or three of those before they just go like, This stinks. Your wife loves you even if you dont give her an orgasm, and she really means it when she says she loves you, but that being said, you better not just stop giving her orgasms all the time. But it isnt always something you are controlling in real time. It will just happen, you might just not have warning about it. So I have that sense in episodes like that, like, Its not gonna kill us, but its not great. Its tough because there are probably a million things about that episode that I thought were hilarious. AVC: Has there ever been an episode that you felt wasnt very good but then the reception for it by critics and fans was far above what you were expecting?

DH: Yup. That is coming up. Critical Film Studies (March 24, 2011) For his birthday, Abed invites Jeff out to dinner, but Jeff and the rest of the group have already set up a party for him at a diner elsewhere. Dan Harmon: I think it ironically began as another bottle episode to save money and aim for a four-day shoot, which saves even more money. Like, what is a bottle episode? Two guys sitting at a table eating dinner. That makes you think of My Dinner With Andre. Whats the irony of Dinner With Andre? There had to be something more to it, since we had the whole Pulp Fiction thing. There had to be a reason why this straight man was stuck at the table. He had to be a prisoner at the table stuck talking to this guy. And also, you had to have a reason to cut back and forth between some things. My Dinner With Andre came up as a target at some point in the writers room, and from there, we went. We were so far behind schedule that there was no table-read for that episode, and the brass were arguing among themselves over editing the drug-play episode by phone. For the large part of this episode, I was in this room alone with Megan [Ganz]. I remember that experience very well because I was at my emotional wits end. I had been told numerous times before that, as early as episode seven, that I was at my wits end. People kept telling me to stop. They would say, Youre at the end of your rope. And Id say, Why are you saying that? That seems like a weird thing to wish on someone. Im really happy. I love my show. And theyd say, No, no, you are exhausted, you need to cool out. And Id go home from those meetings thinking, I think that they just wish that I wasnt me. And its funny, because on that episode, I found out what the actual end of the rope feels like, because there is definitely no point in both seasons where Ive been so terrified of my own failure. Ive never been able to taste it like that. It was a combination of being that far behind schedulethere was no breaking the story, having a draft, table-reading, getting notesand the episode obviously wouldnt have existed if that had had to happen, because that process was designed to stop weird things from happening. And for good reason. There was too much risk and not enough reward. There is money being made and a business being transacted on every other network, and here we are on this little island of Who gives a fuck? But at some point, it doesnt even matter. Stop overthinking it; stop being weird. Whats the worst thing that could happen to your numbers if you go home and sleep a little bit? Sometimes you focus so much on getting away with stuff because you think, Oh, if I could just get away with it, then everything will be great. But then you get away with something accidentally, and you realize, Wait, I get away with everything. Im at the tippy-top of a $2 million investment into a half-hour of television about what? What is even going on in this story? And it surprises people to hear me describe it that way, because mostly it was just a cute episode. It wasnt perceived by anyoneand I refuse to read any reviews of this episodebut it seemed from the Twitter feed that really all of my anxiety was the disparity was really odd. I dont think anyone looks at that episode and thinks, Oh man, you must have really been wrestling with that. It looks like it terrified you. But I was sitting at that desk in

front of a computer, and Megan was sitting where youre sitting, and the first thing that happened was I heard that Russ [Krasnoff], one of the EPs, was wandering the set asking questions about Pulp Fictionlike whether people would understand references to Pulp Fiction. This was the worst thing I could hear. I mean, I was thinking of the Pulp Fiction thing as the sort of dumb anchor that you could just hang onto. And now Im hearing that this guy is going, You know, who knows? Isnt that movie kinda old? And you arent even saying Pulp Fiction, you just have a guy wandering around with boxing gloves on. And its the validity of that observation that made me upset. Its like pulling north off of your compass. So now the needle is spinning. Im sleep-deprived, Im breaking a story on a whiteboard with a 25-year-old writer from The Onion who has never worked in TV in her life, except for Important Things With Demetri Martin. Im breaking a story within a story about a character visiting the set of another TV show, and the story has to be structured to simulate birth, life, and death and there are no jokes. There are just no jokes in it. And Im trying as hard as I can to do what I always do, which is follow my instincts and be pretty sure that what is entertaining to me will be entertaining to the right kind of people in the right numbers to keep me alive. Its just going too far for me to really have this confidence deep down. But its too late. I cant pull the plug, because then we have nothing. I have to stick this landing, but I dont totally believe that I know what Im doing anymore. I can focus on the micro-tasks, like making sure the Cougar Town story actually is a story. I focus on that. Im thinking with a different part of my brain. Its like deck chairs on the Titanic. Youre arranging them beautifully, but what does that mean? Thats not a story. I was putting it off, but then I heard this Pulp Fiction thing. And Russ walks past my door, and I pulled him in, and I just yelled at him, like, Hey, I hear youre walking around not knowing if this Pulp Fiction thing is marketable. And I was like, Why are you asking this now? Im just lashing out at somebody like a gorilla beating my chest, and its really the opposite of being a gorilla, because Im terrified. And I was just more disrespectful to him than I think I have been to anybody in the past two seasons. It was like pulling the wings off a butterfly. I was just asserting myself and letting him know that his opinions didnt matter, which is obviously the opposite of what is true, because why else am I doing this? And he left the room, and I look over, and Megan is like, slumped under the table, because, I mean, why am I doing this in front of a staff writer? And she just tried to stop existing by going under the table. She just lowered her posture to the point where she was invisible during this conversation. And I realized, Why did I do that? I just saw The Social Network, do I think Im [Mark] Zuckerberg? Im trying to Hulk out on this guy who bought the pitch from me. So I went and apologized, and I came back, and I sat at the keyboard, and I cant remember any of the actual conversation, but I was just like, I fucked up, I fucked up really bad. Everybody had been waiting for me to fail this whole time, and I finally did it. This was going to be 20 minutes of dead air. This is a terrible thing. I spiraled and barfed it up. She could have destroyed the show at that moment by just agreeing with me. If she had said nothing, everything would have fallen apart. Instead, I heard her say what I needed her to say, which was something like, I think this is a great episode. This is a great show. If you stop doing what youre doing, I will move back to Michigan. We have to keep doing this and finish it. I know I started crying, and I just rubbed it away, and we just kept going.

And it was a fine episode. People liked it. I cried again when I saw the Twitter feed. It wasnt like they were saying it was Citizen Kane, but they also werent saying, What is this? What happened? They were saying, I love this. I know whats happening. Whether they had seen My Dinner With Andre or not, my hope was that I didnt make the episode dependent on that. People just enjoyed it as an episode. I was at home in my office just crying and watching people not hate it. It made me feel like I couldnt believe how much of a weight had been lifted off my chest. In that six weeks between me crying in my office and the night it aired, I had been walking around with unresolved anxiety. You know, something related to that fraud complex. You dont know what youre doing. Why do you deserve a TV show? Why are you doing these things? Why do you keep trying to get fired? When are you just going to be happy?

Competitive Wine Tasting (April 14, 2011) Jeff grows suspicious when an attractive woman falls for Pierce, and Abed takes a class on Whos The Boss. AVC: You had two episodes added onto your order fairly late. Was this one of those? DH: [Laughs.] No, I know what you mean. But the first season, they added the three extra episodes so late that those three are actually modular, because we proceeded with the last three episodes and just figured, Well, if they actually order the extra three, we can insert them into this gap. But this season, they ordered them early enough that we could fit them in. It was just the same situation as before. We were running late and panicking and just throwing things together. Anything that was happening within the vicinity of My Dinner With Andre was impacted by the gravity of that episode. There were two things happening: There are resources being drawn from my brain for that episode, but more importantlybecause my brain aint that crucial to the goings-on around heremy terror about what Im doing on one of these other episodes that seems risky was being overcompensated for by my going, Whatever you do, make it sound normal. I need a normal one before and after this episode. So 217 and 219 are apologies for 218. In advance and afterward. It makes sense to do that. I go, Look, if Im wrong about this being a good episode, then God forbid that there be a string of three of them. I mean, its a sitcom. There is whistling and clapping, and some guy says, Got milk? and some other guy says, Talk to the hand, and then it goes boing, and there is a reaction shot, and there is a tuba. I was like, Give me that shit. Thats my directive in those moments. I probably shoot stuff down in overcompensation. I cant remember specifically, but I shudder to think. There are probably people pitching me cool shit before and after 218, and Im just like, Nah, what if one of them grows a mustache? It couldnt be more standard. I feel like that one could be in like, season zero. I mean, what is that? Its Jeff Winger not liking to think that Pierce can get laid quicker. Its dumb. You could put it after the STD-fair episode in season one. So what, he hasnt changed since then? Nevertheless, fine, good pizza. Is there anything good about that episode? Its got to be one of the worst.

AVC: Stephen Tobolowskys in it. DH: Oh yeah, thats the Whos The Boss one. Yeah, and he revels in his blog that he was recovering from heart surgery during that, and he still knocked it out of the park. He was great to have. And that story is the redeeming thing about that episode. It was written from scratch three hours before the table-read. And it didnt really change after that. We read it, and then we shot it. Really, the story started out as Abed taking a class about analyzing Whos The Boss. It was more of a runner. There wasnt really an arc to it. He just keeps saying that the class is really complicated. He thought that it would be really easy, but its a lot harder than he expected, you know, figuring out who the boss was. So three hours before we tableread it, we talked about the tropes of professors and students and academic stores and heroes and how this thing could play out. It was fun; it came from a place of joy, just the adrenaline of making shit up and making people laugh. We were writing on the fly. You know, we had a part where Abed says what he says to the professor and walks about and the cameras track him across the courtyard, and there are Cambridge bells for no reason, and then gunshots, and Abed stops and turns his head and keeps walking. [Laughs.] And I killed it. NBC didnt want to do it, but I didnt push back. And I think the writers were a little mad, like they thought I sold them out. But it just wasnt Abeds character. If he knows someone is blowing their brains out and he had a hand in it, he wouldnt not care. Thats not Abed. I think some people were genuinely disappointed that I wasnt punk-rock enough to endorse that storyline. But I felt that that didnt pass my own Standards & Practices. Thats just not Abed.

Paradigms Of Human Memory (April 21, 2011) When the group discovers an unexpected treasure trove, they think back over the adventures of the yearadventures the audience hasnt been privy to. DH: That was just one of those things. It dovetailed quickly with the whole What if Britta and Jeff had been fuck-buddies for the whole year thing. I really love the concept, and the attractive thing about it was that we could do it again. We can do another clip-show episode. We established that it wasnt too obnoxious or too treacle-y or too driven by one particular premise. It can be like the nub of your pen that you switch out for a certain different style. And I cant wait to do it again, because for as cool as that episode turned out, it was so much work, and so hard. Relative to the amount of work, there are ways we could have done that episode and gotten three times as much out of it. It was very difficult to break a story around it. Again, there is always that thing that weighs on us where we go, What do Jeff and Britta fucking have to do with paintball? And this time, Jeff and Britta had been fucking. And I remember [Chris] McKenna being hesitant to build an episode around that. And I never really understood what his beef was, but I wanted to respect that, because he is just good. He just didnt like the idea of building the whole episode around those two hooking up. And it quickly became dog-paddling and thrashing for our lives. I kinda wish he was sitting at the table so I could remember what the

difficulties were in breaking that story. But I know they were tremendous. It was a huge challenge. Typically [clip shows] will be bookended. The Family Ties family will say, Oh no, the power went out, lets open our presents early. And then they will spend the whole episode opening presents, but theres not really a story being told. Its just a clip show. And at the end, they say, Oh, the powers back on. Merry Christmas. We were insistent; we had to feel like we were rounding corners here, on how you do that. Its the comedy that saved us from our failings in that department. Because it really is a challenge we never conquered. If you watch that episode, you can see the seeds are being laid. Its a strong first act in terms of the story. Jeff and Britta have been fucking, What? Oh my God, this portends dot, dot, dot. And we never revisit it. It cascades into random accusations of people being shitty people, and then it comes back around to apologies. It actually ends up being a commentary about their predictability and their ennui, their existential vacuum. I think maybe thats what McKenna might have meant. Maybe he wanted to build it around something like that so it would have had a theme and a backbone, and it probably would have been a superior version of the episode. I dont know, the Jeff/Britta thing seems wedged in there, it really does. AVC: It comes up organically within the episode. DH: Remember how it comes up? I mean, Abed just drops it. It comes up organically, but it is decidedly a sandbag. Originally, my concept was that because Jeff and Britta had been fucking the entire year, they were in higher spirits than the rest of the group. That was a dumb idea. You can see traces of that in the script, but its a dumb idea. Its like, Well, they fuck all the time, so they arent as tense, and they have a secret, and that makes them seem healthier and almost smugly above everyone else. So they remember the Glee episode better, like they forgot that everyone died on the bus, and they remember everything as being adorable because its no big deal. Like, when youre getting laid, nothing seems like life and death. And then youre prying up that suspicion until its like, Wait, have you guys been fucking all year? And there are remnants of that in there that arent held faithful to. Its neither here nor there with any of it. The concept plus the jokes hold that thing together fine. There is some duct tape so strong you can make anything out of it. It all turned out for the best. That was an episode that I didnt walk away from thinking it sucked and then find out from the audience that it was good, but as with many, many, many of themIll just estimate 40 to 60 percent of themI was absolutely convinced that this thing was going to suck in the editing bay as I was editing it. I was just like, This thing is going to stink. We fucked up bad. That happened a lot. And the process is like looking at this baby coming out of me and thinking, This is a monster. What are we going to do? AVC: Are there any of the fake episodes that you flashed back to in that episode that you wish you could have done? DH: Yeah, Haunted House. The idea that these guys would go spend the night in a haunted house, like some kind of creepy old mansion. Well, there goes next Halloween. But I justified it by thinking, Well, that episode would have been fun to write, but it

probably would have sucked. I played that game with myself, where you go, Okay, they are around a campfire, so youre telling me they can never go camping together again? No, they can go camping again, and they will go camping again. This show moves faster. Its metabolism is faster because it was born in a later age. Its like Eric Stoltz in The Fly II. It needs to be faster than Jeff Goldblum in The Fly in order to live. So when they go camping in season three or season five, then it will be the second time they have gone camping, and that will be part of the story. And thats a good thing. It challenges you. Before it even becomes a template, pronouncing Dean Pelton coming into the room in different costumes and beating it to death and making it an emotional experience for him. That was the cool thing about that episode. With the Winger speech and stuff. My fear was that we were only accomplishing the negative part of that, to destroy things that people valued. But when I saw that in the final mix, it was like, We did it. We threaded the needle. It should be an uplifting messagesubtly. We are going, Hey, in our world, we will call ourselves out on any predictability before you will have to. Even if we make it up. Also, any patterns that we get into, they will move twice as fast. We are all the more committed to being a real sitcom by virtue of knowing what that entails. There were times when I was making early cuts that I turned to my girlfriend and said, I think I fucked up again. Actually, when she was looking at an early cut, she resonated my worst fears. She said, You are kind of waving a giant flag about your sitcom and saying, This is a sitcom this time. Like, youre often accused of that, but now, youve done it. And I compensated for that in subsequent cuts. Because its just tiny, micro things that send that message. If you strip things out and ground them, there is a little bit of ridiculousness to things in the form of ad-lib taglines, like Jeff and Britta would walk away from the torn-up house, and Donald [Glover] just ad-libbed, Jeff said he knew how to land a plane. And it was like, Okay, its funny, but if you leave that in, then you have created a different fabric of your reality. The dean saying this habitat was for humanity, there are just so many things going on, but we can fit that into the canon of the show? Where were they? Tijuana? These guys are pointing guns at Pierce. We know they arent in Amsterdam or the North Pole. I felt ultimately really, really, really good about it. But I will always regret that we werent able to simultaneously tell a really great story about the group that made you cry at the end. That would be the hat trick. But the good news is that with that concept, we can go back to it again. AVC: Are there other TV-episode types youd like to play around with? DH: Well, the things that leap to mind are the Rashomon thing. There are a lot of branches coming off of that tree, the Run Lola Run thing, multiple revisitations of the same timeline, multiple timelines, Sliding Doors, all that stuff. Malcolm In The Middle did a Sliding Doors episode, and every show does a Rashomon episode eventually. They are the best episodes ever. The X-Files Rashomon episode was so great and so insightful about their characters. To see Scullys perception of Mulder when shes in a bad mood, her characterization of his persona in a typical X-Files episode where she walks into the room and he is just a little more bubbly and smug and he doesnt have the same vocabulary. He wasnt the real Mulder, he was Scullys perception of Mulder, and I cant think of a better way to reward a fan than that kind of thing a healthy amount of seasons down the road. It seems like there is a lump of like, five different things in that category, and I dont know what you would label itlike timelines, Sliding Doors,

alternate possibilities. I like the idea of the episode that takes you through four iterations of the same events given that this one random thing happened. Its nothing new at all. Paul Reiser has done it, for Gods sake. The good news with that is that I can say, Hey, this is pretty normal sitcom stuff. And I would like to do stuff like that.

Applied Anthropology And Culinary Arts (April 28, 2011) Shirley gives birth in the middle of class, and its revealed that her formerly estranged husband Andre is the father. AVC: When did you decide who the father of the baby was going to be? DH: On the breaking of that episode. I thought, Lets make it Andres. Shes been through enough. It worked in nicely as a simple mislead. It was another episode that we had no time to write. Its ironic to me that you watch that episode, and like I said earlier, we had a childbirth happening in the background of an earlier episode, as if to flagrantly say, We dont run on this stuff. We disregard it, because it is just a regular part of life, and its not that big of a deal. I dont know if its shameful or delightful doing exactly that in the foreground. But it was hard to make engaging. I was like, What are we going to do? Get her to lay down here and squirt the baby out? Its hard. It was really hard. Its so funny to me that the handshake part with Pierce, for the moment that it was onscreen, it was absolutely sucking energy away from this creation of life. Like Troy saying Nooo and refusing to do the handshake with Pierce. There is so much more joy in that moment than in the actual creation of a life. AVC: One of the characters having a child with all of her friends around in a public place is a very standard TV device. When you use these types of devices, what do you do to make it stand out? DH: Well, what I would have done to make it stand out would have been to make it real. I would have done a lot of reading about actual childbirth and made it more like a M*A*S*H episode talking about the plumbing and the ins and outs of what needs to happen. Thats what I would have done to make it ironic. I would have said, Look whos giving birth on the next Community. And I would have put it in, and you would have been shocked at the medical texture of the birthing process. And Abed would have understood it, too, because he would have researched it. But I just didnt have time. We had to do the birth story, the baby had to come out. I mean, its either that or shes not going to play paintball. I thought it was surprisingly touching with Changs performance, holding her hand and lifting her up with the silly stories of Chang babies. That was a success. Pierce disappears from that episode. You see, with the handshake, they are like, Its back, and Pierce is supposed to walk in and be like in the frame. Ill put it in the DVD. And he goes, Congratulations, you have passed the test. But the whole thing is driven by the fact that he tried to kill their handshake. So what were missing is coverage. They are doing this thing, and you are supposed to sense his envy of them. You are supposed to see him looking at them getting their magic back and then see him say, Congratulations, you passed the test. And having them go, What test? and feeling the pressure of not having an answer in that situation, he looks over at Shirley and says,

Shirley, Ill give you $500 for that baby. And she says, No, and he says, Congratulations, you passed the test too, and then just runs out before anyone can call him on his evil. That was the script. None of the nuances of the performances were captured. So it was just like the oddest fever dream youve ever seen. They get their handshake back, Pierce walks into frame and says, Congratulations, you have passed the test. There is no tracking of his envy or anything. Now the audience is identifying with them and not with Pierce. What are you talking about? And he is going, Shirley, Ill give you $500, and it seems like we are telling you that Pierce had snapped. He has lost his mind, hes having a stroke or something, and he just skips out of the room. It was just like the director didnt get the joke. It taught me a lesson about cutting it all from the episode.

A Fistful Of Paintballs/For A Few Paintballs More (May 5, 2011/May 12, 2011) The two-part finale covers the outbreak of another disastrous paintball game on the Greendale campus. DH: We conceived it as a two-parter in order to make the pitch more palatable. When we started talking about paintball finales, the studios justifiable response was, You just got back down to zero over budget, and now youre pitching something thats going to go back up to 700 over? And Joe Russo and I tap-danced and said, Yeah, but if its a two-parter, you amortize your costs and stuff. Its all very true. It turned out as much over budget as anything. We didnt care whether they were going to air them a week apart or back-to-back, and I knew that if we got used to one idea, it was going to end up being the other. So I am proud of myself for anticipating the unpredictable nature, because for a very long time, theyI think even the schedule indicates that it was going to be an hourlong finale. I cant imagine how gross it would have been, because I kept saying from the beginning, Okay, hourlong finale, but still, each half-hour needs to stand on its own. I especially knew in syndication and on the DVD and stuff, youre going to be viewing these things differently, and I also knew there was going to be the possibility that minds would be changed. So I was like, These things need to function individually as episodes while somehow having a little bit of a narrative connection. They were saying, Yeah, well air it back-to-back on this date, and then very quickly, they changed their minds. It had to do with staggering things with 30 Rock, this and that. Its always things that are outside your control. Youre a sailor, and there are hurricanes, and you just need to plan for everything. I wanted them to be back-to-back, but I didnt care if they werent. That was the philosophy there.

AVC: Looping back to the premire, what did you want to accomplish with the finale? How did you want to close out the story of the season? DH: Back in the beginning of the season, my only directive was, Lets just make sure we dont do another cliffhanger. It kind of went out the window, didnt it? I mean the

idea of not doing a cliffhanger. Everything went out the window, because we were behind schedule, because its hard to write those stories and shoot those episodes. In the end, were just pulling together whatever we can. In answer to your question from earlier, is there an episode that I thought sucked that everyone liked? The answer is the last one. [Laughs.] I didnt watch it until I saw that you guys were reviewing it positively and that the audience was enjoying it. I didnt go to the sound mix for it. I couldnt stand the idea of watching it ever again. I edited my cut. I handed it off to the network and studio. I didnt even get final cut on the episode, because they had notes they wanted to address. It wasnt their fault, either. It was none of that. I just felt like the script was rushed and the shooting of it was rushed. And I felt like when people are charging across a field in this big paintball war, we hadnt captured any of it on camera. I felt like we had absolutely failed to tell the story that we were trying to tell. What I didnt count on was the fact that that TV as a medium is a closer cousin to radio than cinema, and that you can get away with a lot more just by saying, Im a hero. I feel this way. This is a huge battle, and were scared. People respect the effort; theyre not even drawing the distinction. I was looking at it like a filmmaker, going, Weve shown nothing. This is supposed to feel like Braveheart. These people are supposed to be in a war. You cant tell whos winning and whos losing. So I was abjectly ashamed of the episode. Because I look at Modern Warfare, and I go, This should be hanging in a museum, this is a perfect piece of television. The shots are composed, and the story is told. Its unstoppable, and everyones going to compare. The next time we go down this road, theyre going to compare it to this, and it has to be twice as good. And I thought the finale was three times as bad. I thought, This is going to disappoint our fans, and is going to blow our chances at Emmy recognition, because its going to leave a bad taste to a perfect season in everyones mouth. I was really down on it, and last night everybody liked it. This must be what brought [Kurt] Cobain to the garden house, because I dont get how Im supposed to tell the difference anymore. Am I getting in the way? Should I just play power chords? Then I watched it, and I was like, Oh, I get it. The jokes are funny. The stories are landing. The characters are people that weve grown to love over 49 episodes. There was much less at hand than I thought. And yeah, I am getting in the way to the extent that I take myself so seriously that I think the job is more than to support these characters. Theyre already in peoples living rooms and are welcome there, and my job at this point is to take a garbage bag and make sure that the ashtrays dont fill up and order pizzas in advance. Facilitate the relationship that is there. I can fuck that up by overthinking things, and Im just glad I was wrong about that. It is a notable response to your question. Ive never felt that way that much, there was never that much disconnect between episodes. Like I said, theres been one through-line in the edit, going This thing is going to suck, but I usually realize by the time Im done with that, either that its so good to me that I dont care if people like it, or its not that great, and then people are okay with it. Never have I not gone to the sound mix because I felt so terrible, This episodes bad, its a bad way to end the season, and

then had people go, Epic, awesome, best, best-ever, great, you did it, good job! Pretty weird. AVC: Howd you make the choice to go from the more action-heavy motif to a Western and vaguely Star Wars-ian episode? DH: That was easy. The fear was that doing a Modern Warfare sequel, we wouldnt be able to have the rate of fire, the body count. The philosophy was to supplant action with style, and we asked ourselves what genres do that. Spaghetti Westerns, fewer people get shot per minute, and yet it feels all the more visceral and action-movie-ish, because of the codes they represent and the idea that if this gun comes out of its holster, someones gonna die. The original concept was to do one big spaghetti Western backto-back, have them be two stories narratively, but not to break style like that. The subsequent decision to lighten things up, it was just one of those things where Joe [Russo] was shooting the spaghetti episode, and doing such a good job of it, making it so dark and so postmodern and creepy and John Carpenter-y, that he and I both arrived at the simultaneous conclusion that we should probably not stick the landing on this one in the second episode, that we should probably come up for air, turn the fluorescent lights on. Thats what made me start thinking about Star Wars, because the body count is higher, things are exploding, people are falling in love. Its truly epic, and theres a lightness to it. Everything is washed in light, and music is sweeping. It feels innocent and yet somehow theres a gravity, because of the epicness. That seemed the way to go. And yet theres a traditional union there between Westerns and Star Wars, in which Star Wars is Magnificent Seven in space, or Seven Samurai. It was a spontaneous decision, but a good one. AVC: The finale is less any one characters story than this entire ensemble youve built. DH: Yes. The four-year storys got Greendale all over it. We start the pilot with the arrival at this campus. This fish out of water, the one guy who doesnt want to be there. The characters of Jeff Winger and Greendale are created simultaneously. First season, the camera stays on campus; second season, it starts to wander. Halfway through that second season, Jeff Winger makes the decision that he loves the study group. At the end of the second season, Greendale is being more celebrated than the study group itself. There are implications of that in the Valentines Day episode. Its the idea that once youve made the decision to love your wife, youre almost making the decision to love women a little more. You have to respect them more. You cant just say, Well, my wife is the best person ever, and everyone else is a piece of shit. You have to become less misogynistic. And Jeff Winger is becoming less misanthropic and less solipsistic. Ending the season with a celebration of Dean Pelton and Greendale and our group fitting snugly within it like a Russian doll is definitely a deliberate macro-narrative decision that has to do with how the next two years will play out. Its an important way to begin the third season, and it sets up very important things for season four and beyond. AVC: Looking back at all these, what would you say is your favorite, and which your least favorite?

DH: Its really hard to pick. Least favorite, lets go first, it should be easier. Lets say either 217 or 219, right? 217 is AVC: Custody Law And Eastern European Diplomacy. DH: Oh right. So that ones great, because youve got Britta stealing the Kickpuncher DVD and getting busted. The muted-trombone joke. Brittas in there and interacting with Troy and Abed. 219 is AVC: Competitive Wine Tasting. DH: Wine Tasting. Yeah, that ones got to be my least favorite, thats a piece of shit. Set fire to that fucking thing. [Laughs.] Its still great. Its still so much better than other TV shows. Kevin Corrigans in it. Yeah, but Id say thats probably my least favorite, unless theres one Im blocking out emotionally. I mean, 202 [The Psychology Of Letting Go] is pretty shitty. But its an early one, so youve got some energy there. But youve got that whole oil-spill thing. It just doesnt feel like my show. Its me fucking up. Between those two, Im going to say, God, fuck that Whos The Boss thing. Thats hard. Its really hard, because theyre almost at polar ends of the season. 202 has this ruddy-faced shittiness to it. 219 is this weathered, behind-schedule shittiness. What is the worse crime? I think its probably actually less charismatic, less admirable to be on schedule and to break an episode like 202. Thats the shittiest one. Yeah, its the girls oil-wrestling because they dont like how each other dresses. Oh wait, you want me to pick my favorite one too. AVC: Or a range. DH: The ones I rattle off, it does start for me at 208 [Cooperative Caligraphy]. All the episodes before that, I have varying levels of fondness for, but I do feel like something happens going forward from 208. None of the episodes before that are submitted for Emmy consideration or anything like that. But 208, 209 [Mixology Certification], 210 [Conspiracy Theories And Interior Design], the Christmas episode, Dungeons & Dragons, the hospital episode, Dinner With Andre episode. And the first paintball, the spaghetti Western paintball, is kind of growing on me. Theres a lot of stuff in there, but I got to give that time. Picking the absolute favorite is really difficult, because theyre so different. [Let me] run through a thought experiment in my head that defines favorite. Like, if I was going to heaven or a high-school reunion or a desert island and I wanted to bring an episode that represented, like, I make a sitcom, I think I would go with 208, the bottle episode. Because all of the other ones are good in the commission of proving something right or wrong about TV, and the bottle episode is pure love of TV and love of the show itself. You look at 215 [Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking], its a great achievement, but its soiled by my spite for better shows. Its like Im trying to make some point. 214 [Advanced Dungeons & Dragons] even is me trying to rub my nerdiness in the studios face. All of them are tainted with some agenda. 208 feels the most innocently joyful. It feels focused on those characters, and they drive the episode. Theres cleverness, of course, but its all a back seat to, Wow, this show could run forever.

AVC: You start work on season three in a month. What do you hope to do? DH: I hope to plan ahead. Ive had good experiences with that and bad experiences, but I hope to sit down with the writers in the beginning of the third season and ask ourselves what the most glorious way to end the third season would be. I want to ask where were going to end up. I want to ask that generally, and I want to ask that about each character. Thats a dangerous firecracker to play with, and I was wise to not play with it before now. But nows the time to play with it, because if I dont, Im not being responsible. Its the third season. Its not about proving things and reacting to things anymore. Its about, So what? Its about, What are you going to do? And so whether I like it or not, and as risky as it is, I need to lay some plans at the beginning of season three that well build to at the end. And I think thats going to be a sweeping enough change to accomplish. Ive been studying The Wire over this break and observing the art of the opposite of modularity, which is serialization. Thats not to say that season three of Community will be season four of The Wire, but it is to say that beyond Modern Family and beyond Parks And Rec, the ingredient that will keep Community alive to season four exists somewhere in The Wire. [Laughs.] I dont know how to explain that, but I know it has something to do with the way they end their seasons with these glamorous montages and needle-drops of these stories that seemed disparate and all operate on some theme. It very much reminds me of the end of the first season on Spaced. Theres a feeling that starts from your diaphragm that goes up to the top of your scalp when youre watching the final moments of a season being executed by someone who didnt think of themselves as getting away with something episode by episode, but rather looked at their season as a product, too. I want to bring 8 percent of that into Community for season three, to stay alive.