On Monday, the Campus Events Commission screened an upcoming episode of the NBC comedy “Community,” followed by a question-and-answer session with creator Dan Harmon; actors Yvette Nicole Brown, Donald Glover and Alison Brie; and executive producers Russ Krasnoff, Joe Russo, Neil Goldman and Garrett Donovan. Harmon spoke with the Daily Bruin’s Alex Goodman after the event.
Daily Bruin: The group dynamics among the main characters is integral to the success of the show. How quickly did that come together?
Dan Harmon: I think it became really evident, and it also became evident how out of our control it was, on the Halloween episode last year. … The Halloween episode, as planned, was sort of halfway through what we saw originally as a 12-episode process that would end with Christmas, of making Jeff Winger (Joel McHale), the consummate soloist, get consumed by this group. It was really clear by virtue of chemistry in the Halloween episode that it already happened.
DB: Were you like the Jeff Winger character in community college?
DH: Not really, in community college I kept to myself. … I always felt that way growing up, and I felt like that meant that people wanted me to talk to them and make them feel better about the choices they were making. … I was looking for ways to feel better about myself with the kinds of women that would reject me or the kinds of chemicals that would make me late for work. … The Joel McHale aspect is all of the handsomeness, the fact that he’s 6-foot-4, the fact that he can get away with it, that when he does it people still like him, all that stuff that a good actor brings to the table.
DB: The show has gotten much more ambitious recently, especially since the “Modern Warfare” episode at the end of the first season. When did you decide to go in that direction with the show?
DH: I think it was around the Halloween episode, when Justin Lin, the director, he was talking about how to make that chair fort collapse, and I was talking to him about doing action and comedy, and how the two interplay, and I recognized a certain spark in his eye. … I was like, “We can do this. … We can juggle tone, and we can do it at this budget with these actors, and I think people will freak out.” … At first, I was just trying to fulfill the job description of making a show that was recognizable as network television. It wasn’t until later in the season, I was like, “OK, kind of did that I guess, and no one’s giving a crap anyway.” … Then I knew that was the time to go nuts, because I knew we would have gotten canceled or something if we hadn’t kind of zigged and zagged and started looking weird and acting unpredictably.
DB: A lot of it comes from spoofing pop culture. Are you guys all totally in tune with the happenings of pop culture?
DH: Obviously we’ve got Joel McHale on the set, and he knows his contemporary stuff, all of the stuff that I don’t know, that I have to learn from watching “The Soup.” But then you’ve got me, I’m essentially like Abed (Danny Pudi). I learned everything that I know about people from watching movies when I was growing up and TV. … When I’m talking about story, I’m bringing those things up, going like, “Oh, it’s like “˜Goodfellas,’ the power struggle they’re having over this thing,” and then it’s an easy step to go, “Well, why don’t we just let it be like that thing,” because that’s what we’re going for anyway. … The actors all have varying pop cultural vocabularies, and the writers all come from different places, but we all have a sort of shared philosophy.
DB: Do you have a good sense of how the show is being received?
DH: The ratings would indicate that it’s what they call a marginal show, it’s a bubble show, they use these terms. We have a very, very young demographic, and you can feel the energy from fans and stuff, when we went to Comic-Con, the response we got, the conversations I have on Twitter, the comments section. … It seems like there’s a really nice, passionate, underground following that the show has, a very strong, passionate, solid number that would follow the show anywhere.
DB: One of the most popular aspects of the show seems to be the “bromance” between Troy and Abed. Was that written into the show, or did that naturally occur between the two actors?
DH: Definitely the latter, it happened with those two guys being adorable together. Originally, if you watch some of the earliest episodes, you’ll see that the writers are trying to force Chevy (Chase) and Donald (Glover) to happen, as like a Beavis and Butt-Head. That was my original concept, was those guys are the little kids in the family, so they’re like the little brothers, and they get into trouble together, and Abed’s his own thing. But Danny (Pudi) and Donald started hanging out together the first weekend that the show was on the air, they helped each other move. They’re just cute together, and everybody likes them together, and then on-screen when they’re doing stuff together ““ I saw them beat-box together on a red carpet, so I wrote a little rap for them, that “Biblioteca” rap. Then it was out of our hands.
DB: Most people attend community college for two years, and the show is now in its second season. What’s going to happen after this season?
DH: Most people go to community college for a very long time, my friend. But I know the traditional experience of the high school student is you go for two years, drum up those credits and then transfer to a university, so I’ve been telling the writers, this season we need to deal with that with Troy and Annie. We need to address what their plan is, where they think they’re going and if they’re not leaving at the end of this year why that’s the case. I want to do that very gracefully, because I don’t want you to feel our tap dance, I want you to actually feel like it’s really happening. Of course it’s what we all want, for circumstances to change such that everybody is going there for a little bit, but you don’t want it to feel really fakey, like, “Oh, we tried to leave the island, and we ended up on the other side.” What that is is an invitation to do really specific, grounded, meandering character work this year, and I think a good second season does that anyway.
E-mail Goodman at agoodman@media.ucla.edu.