On 'Community'

Community (B-) Well, it's not a classic sitcom like Fawlty Towers. But at this point, it's right up there. It's one of the best written sit-coms that I've ever seen. In fact, here's an informative and insightful article in Wired explaining creator Dan Harmon's process. It's a joy to watch the shenanigans of the various characters unfold, and the the resolutions are surprising yet inevitable.

So why do I personally have so many problems with it?

Well, when you read the article in Wired, you come away with the impression that Dan Harmon got his start as a physicist before becoming a writer. (At least I do. At this point in my whiny little blog, I'd like to point out that I approach writing as an organic process, as opposed to someone like Harmon. This isn't to imply that Harmon's 'doing it wrong', just that from my perspective, I can see what I consider flaws in his process.) He uses a circle with eight slices to describe a character's story arc, which is okay. It helps to diagram out a story visually if you're working with other writers, and it ensures everyone in the room is on the same page. But I noticed that Harmon's got all these white boards all over his office, just covered with diagrams and notes that make his office look like the workspace of a particularly driven quantum physicist. So here's my points. Again, please bear in mind that I'm being totally subjective, and that Harmon has a show, and I do not:

1) THE 'EIGHT-POINT CIRCLE' FAVORS STORY OVER SPONTANEITY. Once you start using this process to describe a character, if you try to give the character another vector of motivation, you will make his 'circle' more complex and convoluted. This makes a writer's job tougher than it should be, and it makes the audience turn off. For instance, Shirley, the single Christian black mother on the show can't pursue a romantic long-term relationship in the context of the show because it will lead to too many complications in fitting her character into the show. If she does, according to the pie chart, she must split up with him by the show's end. It's the same thing with Joel McHale's character. He dates a teacher on the show, and because their dynamic is making the consequences too convoluted, she has to dump him by a later episode. Same with Allison Bell's character and the 'tiny-nippled' hippie. An organic process could spin these off into future story arcs to the show's benefit. But, because they wind up adding complications to the show that both the writers and the audience have to work past, these resolutions have to be sorted out very quickly.

A successful example of good organic writing is that show Which Will Prevent Alien Civilizations From Wiping Us Out, David Simon's, The Wire. McNulty is threatened by his superiors that if he continues to rock the boat, he will be transferred to Maritime detail in the Baltimore Police Force. . By the end of season one, McNulty has, sure enough, been transferred to the Maritime detail. Another character, Roland "Prez" Pryzbylewski, has been dumped onto McNulty's crew because he's seen as incompetent. While being stuck in the office, Prez cracks the pager codes for the Barksdale drug dealers and wins the respect of the others for his skills. However, in season three, Prez has been suspended for accidentally shooting an undercover officer, quits the force and become a school teacher by season four. In a traditional t.v. show, this would effectively write their characters off the show. In the Wire, this opens up new storytelling venues. (McNulty finds dead Russian hookers in a van in the next season, and Prez gets a story arc about the big frustrations and small triumphs of being a teacher in Baltimore.) Commuinty doesn't have the capacity to realize story arcs like these.

Another aspect is the merit in improv comedy. While 'Bridesmaids' was a bit too long, the pleasures of watching professional comedians riff with each other brought an extra layer of fun to the movie. I suspect actors brought up in the improv tradition of the Second City would be totally frustrated with Harmon's approach. Which is why he's got performers that are actors first, and comedians second.

(Addendum: As I write this, evidently a long-simmering feud between Dan Harmon and Chevy Chase has just bubbled to the forefront. I understand Chase was frustrated at the level of writing in the scripts and voiced his concerns in his legendary assholish manner to Harmon. Harmon responded by also being a dick to Chase. This led to Chase storming off the set during the last episode of shooting. Then, at a wrap party, Harmon led the cast and crew in a 'Fuck You, Chevy' chant to Chase's face in front of Chase's wife and daughter. Chase responded to this by leaving a profanity-and-abuse laden phone message to Harmon. And finally, Harmon responded by putting out Chase's message out in the public sphere. Class acts all around, folks. While Chase has a reputation for being a spoiled, entitled baby in the industry, in this case, he has a legitimate point. Since the actors are so comfortable with these characters at this stage, I don't really see any reason why Harmon and the writers can't work more with them to put allow for more improvisation into the stories. I understand the limits on a show like time and budget issues, but with something like 'Community', this whole incident is just underlining my basic point.)

2) THIS APPROACH LEADS TO A STATIC STORY ARC- As I write this, 'Community' is continuing it's third season. I've only seen the first season, but given the premise of the show, a story problem just occurred to me. Once all the characters finish their courses at Greendale College-(Community colleges usually have two-year courses), they'll graduate and move on with their lives. So if there's a fourth season, Harmon and his writers have got to come up with a palatable reason to keep the characters together. Either the characters all take on jobs at the college, or there's an equally plausible explanation why seven non-students are meeting at a community college. I know this is kind of nit-picky, but when you have a show so tightly plotted like 'Community', logical problems like this do tend to stand out, more than in a traditional sit-com.

Another example of a story hole is the premise of 'Big Bang Theory'. Junior physicists Sheldon and Leonard share an apartment in Los Angeles. Their neighbour is an attractive young woman named Penny, who works at the Cheesecake Cafe while pursuing a career as an actress. So consider this: Penny makes about $28 grand a year as a waitress, and the boys probably pull in high five-low six figure salaries at the California Institute of Technology. I've only seen the first three seasons of that show, but it's never explained why Sheldon and Leonard live where they do. (Maybe the show has by now, I don't know.) Are they saving up to take a ride on the Russian space station? Are they paying off the damage incurred when the apartment elevator blew up? Again, it's a minor point, but it kinda bugs me.

This is the crux of sit-coms. If Officer Tuttle buys a tuba, and starts practicing it around the setting of the show, by the end of the show, he'll either quit practicing the tuba because it's annoying the other characters, or it gets destroyed 'by accident'. And next week, Officer Tuttle's tuba playing is never referenced again. My point being, that sit-coms always, always, always start from a point of equilibrium, and return to that point of equilibrium. While characters within the show gain some wisdom and/or experience during the course of events in the show. But sure as night follows day, their hubris or inexperience leads them to make the same mistakes over and over again. If you look at this from an existential perspective, it's like being in Hell, isn't it? (Or as Chevy Chase put it, 'like being forced to watch 'Howdy Doody' in Hell'.)

Which is why 'Arrested Development' was so good. The series starts with 'Good' son Michael Bluth leaving the corrupt and amoral family business to move with his son to another state. A financial catastrophe involving the family business forces Michael to stay and fix up his family business, while at the same time getting drawn into the lives of his selfish family members. The series ended when Michael finally threw up his hands, packed up his stuff, and left for greener pastures, just like he had originally intended. 'Arrested Development' s writing process was based around a simple broad premise, but the potential for stories within that premise is limitless.

3)THE DIAGRAMMING APPROACH IS LEADING TO AN ERA OF PROFESSIONAL FAN-FICTION This is something that's been bugging me for a while about contemporary commercial media for a while, and I've been struggling to figure out what and why exactly I find so much out there so annoying. Once you take a creative process like writing and reduce it down to a bunch of formulae, (The eight point circle) or nostrums of accepted wisdom, (The geeky guy gets the hot girl in the end.) or tie everything up at the end so it's all 'Back to Normal', you turn an artform into a product off of an assembly line. What happens then, is people without the background or skill sets in storytelling wind up believing, and not unreasonably so, that they can plug any element into any other element and they will be producing work that is equal in merit to that done by professional script writers.

This is what 'Fan-fic' is. Now, if you're starting out as a writer, and you love, say, Harry Potter sooo much that you want to put your own take on a Harry Potter story, you can plug in characters and elements from the Harry Potter franchise to make your own story. And hey! You're not constrained by things like copyrights and practical concerns like co-ordinating actor's schedules. So why not put the characters from, oh, say, 'Twilight' in the Harry Potter universe? (There's a 'de-motivational' poster out there on the web of photos of Sheldon from 'Big Bang Theory' and Dr. Gregory House from 'House M.D.' with the caption: 'Can you imagine an argument between these two?' Yes. Yes, I can. And I have no doubt there's a fan-fic out there depicting just that.)

No. No, it wouldn't, actually.

You can imagine something like this happening in 'Community'. For example: Greendale College is allegedly haunted by the ghost of a former faculty member. So the pan-sexual dean calls up a trio of paranormal investigators to check it out. And at great expense to NBC, special guests Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, and Ernie Hudson are brought onboard. (From 'Ghostbusters'! Geddit? Geddit?) Why, the whole story just writes itself! And that's the problem. Some concepts are better off being unrealized, folks. After a while, stunts like this are going to seem more like creative desperation to give an audience what it wants, than to give an audience what it needs. And ultimately, sooner rather than later, the message boards of the internet are going to be buzzing with posts like, 'Hey, remember when 'Community' was good?'

I realize that I'm starting to get a bit inflammatory here, so let me just backtrack a bit. For what it's worth, 'Community' is probably the best written sit-com I've watched since 'Arrested Development'. The characters are well-developed and they're of a type that manage to subvert their stock conventions. (If you watch it for a few episodes, you'll see what I mean.) A lot of the humour of the show is based on not just funny lines, but who's saying exactly what lines. The show's not afraid to go off in directions that you don't expect sitcoms to go. It's just that it's been talked up so much, I went in with really high expectations. And at the end of the day, it's just a situation comedy. Dan Harmon's not curing cancer, or solving world conflicts here. When 'Arrested Development' ended, it ended exactly the way it should have. When 'Community' ends its run, I guarantee its most vocal current fans won't be bemoaning its end.