I miss the middle aged Mexican lady next to my old apartment that was UNCEASINGLY astonished by my resemblance to Russel Crowe.  Every day she saw me, for five years, she never stopped thinking I looked EXACTLY like Russel Crowe and her mind NEVER stopped being blown by it.  I would strategically time my front door exits with hers so that I could get another chance to shrug demurely and nod my head as a woman practically leapt up and down on the sidewalk pointing at me, saying “My GOD.  You look MORE like him now than before!  What’s his name?  The Gladiator?”

“Russel Crowe.”

“Russel Crowe!  Do you know how much you look like him?!”

“I…no, I’ve never really heard that before, but it’s flattering.”

“You look…Are you telling me nobody ever tells you that you look like Russel Crowe?”

“No.  I mean, you do, but I tend to get Fat Randy Quaid.”

“Okay, I don’t know who that is, but I know who Gladiator is.  You look like Gladiator.”

“Are you hitting on me?”

“Ha!”

“Just kidding.  Thank you.  I wish I did look like him -“

“-you DO.”

“I will accept it.  Because it’s rude to argue.  So thank you.  I’ll talk to you later.”

“Okay, bye.  There goes Russel Crowe everybody!”

“Hi, everyone, I’m Russel Crowe.”

“Ha!”

“Ha!”

And then I would go to a bar, pull up an image of Russel Crowe on my phone and look at it with a quiet smile.

Anyway, I miss that lady.  I mean, I don’t miss her as a human being, she was pretty irritating and constantly yelling at me for playing my TV above 2 decibels past 5pm.  I kind of hated her.

But I miss being told I looked like Russel Crowe.

I have, physically, had worse and better 2:30 AMs than this. I haven’t seen that recent Planet of the Apes movie but based on the descriptions I’ve heard, its third act is unfolding in my abdomen. I feel like I accidentally swallowed an entire very put-upon chimp with zero tolerance for captivity and a vindictive determination to make some points known on the way out.

Fiv just rubbed her nose on my phone and posted the above paragraph as its own tumblr entry. It was supposed to be an opener. So I deleted and am restarting. If you want less of my fat obnoxious personal life and more talking about you and Community, skim down a bit. If you find this entry long and pointless, YOUR REFUND IS IN THE MAIL, fuck off, it’s my internet, too. Sorry I snapped at you.

Too be graphic, I am shitting water and regurgitating, well, there’s no adorable way to say it, foam, right now, BUT, I am smiling between violent wretches for several reasons:

• one of our writers has been suffering from colitis/crones the entire time I’ve known him and had to have his colon removed so I know I have nothing to complain about. I think Steve’s reaction to me describing my symptoms right now would be “ah, those were the days.”

• I am uncontrollably pukin’ and poopin’ in the first house I’ve ever owned, on my first night in it. That’s why I was in a hotel the last two days. My assistant, Daniella (I know, right?) who I am convinced is an actual angel, oversaw my move via this fancy service while I “wrote” episode 315, and by “wrote” I mean surfed porn and drank. All I had to do was go pick up Fiv from the old place, drive her over to the new place, call Daniella to tell her I had taken the wrong keys, wait 20 minutes, apologize to Daniella, and walk into my new place. This is an obnoxious thing to be able to do and I am keenly aware that when you moved, there were milk crates, warm six packs, hernias and strained friendships involved, and I have been there, and that is why I am smiling. I have a good life. This time of year in Milwaukee I would have been duct taping sheets of plastic across the windows to keep the snow out of the living room. I also would have then hit a bong made from a maple syrup bottle and played Resident Evil for 7 hours. My life was good then, too.

• I am very optimistic about this situation with Community. Not in a naive, let’s-think-positive-because-we-may-as-well way. I am optimistic in a shrewd, practical, look at the situation and place the bet you’d place if you were betting your life way. I think the most thorough, informed and incidentally optimistic analysis of our situation was in the AV Club article to which I am too lazy to link here, but you can find it by googling, it’s called “eight reasons community might come back” or something. If it’s self deluded bullshit, it’s the type that really goes the distance to suspend your disbelief. It worked on me.

Here’s a slightly less scientific but immediately present factor that makes me see very clearly that Community’s story is not over: you guys are fucking nuts, in the best way possible. And you are beautiful and kind and honest. And there is a magic emanating from you. You are in lockstep with a universal rhythm, here. You put our show on the cover of TV Guide BEFORE any of this was going down. It looks from a distance like we got yanked and THEN there was this pity party of clicking on that poll to make some point, but that is not what happened, I was there the whole time watching. First, you won us that cover. And TV Guide swore us to secrecy. Then, NBC rescheduled us. Then TV Guide came to the set and took the photos of the cast and swore them to secrecy. We were half wondering if the network would pull strings to kill the cover because, well, you know, awkward much? My point is that when I look at the timeline, I don’t see a boring cause-effect chain. I see a weird, ironic, poetic blossom of mythology. I see story points. I see the folds in the universal cootie catcher, I see an absurdly happy ending.

Here’s what’s going to happen in the short term. The Christmas episode is going to be very well received, because it’s pointless to punch a man on a stretcher but more importantly, the Christmas episode rules. We’re going to have dramatically higher ratings because more people promote and watch holiday episodes, and it’s our unintentional finale and the Pittsburgh and St. Louis affiliates, two of our biggest viewerships, aren’t going to air their news anchors playing Pictionary, they’re going to give Gillian Jacobs, the PRIDE OF PITTSBURGH, the holiday party she deserves. And we’re going to break a 2 (I can’t believe that’s become a dream, but, fuck it). And the mushroom cloud is going to turn into the word “WHY,” and it’s going to stay there until the obvious choice is to bring this little scrapper back.

And, by the way, I agree with the AV Club that the answer to “why” is not a sinister one. It’s time to give Up All Night the same shot every new show at NBC gets. They can’t air everything at the same time. They have to move stuff around and try to find the magic combination. It has equal potential to be exactly what we need. We were the obvious player to bench for a few. Yes, I’d love to be on the court forever but I’d also love to be taller and I’m not. It’s not exactly what I’d call stupid coaching.

So what should we do during the hiatus? Well, I’ll be working. Doing my part, which is to make the show, should it come back, come back strong. I will fail and I will succeed. You guys seem better able than I at figuring out things to do. Here’s something I wouldn’t do: don’t send jaded tweets to shows or personalities you perceive as somehow competing with us. If you’re over thirteen, you know Whitney Cummings doesn’t choose her time slot, and that we’re no more entitled to it than any other show. If creatives were running things, we would try to create a situation in which everybody got to see everything they wanted to see. And that is the landscape that is emerging, and it’s a less profitable one for the previous generation’s conglomerates, and it is those companies that prefer you to think your selection of one show over defines you as a person and is a matter of life and death. The truth is, people that make you want to laugh are on your side, and people that want to make money off you laughing kind of aren’t, but they own everything and they get us connected to you.

Holy shit, my thumbs are tired. It’s 4:30 now? Ironically, my literary diarrhea seems to have abated the real thing. I might be able to sleep, now. I’ll post as-is, I think editing this entry for content would be like pouring spot remover on a dog.

You guys are the best. That ratings hike was all you.

Community’s episode “Advanced Gay” had a very simple, fast moving story about fathers and sons - particularly the relationship between Pierce Hawthorne, established homophobe, and his father, whom, it turns out, is all the more homophobic.

A conflict arises between the two that is not acknowledged by the son until the end of the episode, when it’s too late, and is, prior to that, tampered with by Jeff Winger, himself a son of a Dad with whom he has unacknowledged issues.

In telling this story, we used the notion of a “gay community” as a tool. When you saw gay characters in the story, you weren’t seeing much of them. The two gay characters with lines were clearly gay, from the moment they spoke. The entire time they spoke, they were parts of setups and punchlines about gayness, and the surface never got scratched beyond that.

The rest of the gay characters that we saw were “background” at a big, gay party, jumping around in gay outfits having a great time being super, duper gay. They functioned as a single entity, cheering when someone liked gay people, booing when someone didn’t, and as soon as they had fulfilled their usefulness to the story, they were gone, and nobody ever atoned with them, and they were never revealed to be made up of dimensional individuals with fears and desires transcending a big gay throng.

I apologize for an unintentional effect that seems to have had on some of you. I got two or three tweets that didn’t seem to be from crazy people- I can usually tell the difference between someone that just enjoys the opportunity to be outraged and a real fan expressing human confusion, concern, etc. “How do you defend this,” one of you asked, linking to an IMDB post indicting the episode’s depictions.

I took the question seriously. The answer is, I have no defense. Had I predicted I’d need one, I would have done things differently, because Community isn’t in the offending or defending business. Unless you’re Jim Belushi.

For all its apolitical, joyful, empty headed zaniness and experimentation, Community is a passionately humanitarian show. Its only religious and political point of view is that all people are good people, and while we often play the roles of villains and stereotypes to each other, it is always an illusion, shattered quickly by the briefest moment of honest connection.

We all need a hug.  God knows I do or I wouldn’t be doing this show, so if someone experiences the opposite of a hug while watching my show, then, by virtue of the golden rule, I am regretful, and I am compelled to promise you it was an accident, and that it’ll come up in my head the next time we’re in a similar situation. That’s unavoidable.

This blog entry is a sort of “receipt” I’m giving you, proof that I’m conscious of the fact that some of you might have been abraded, because if I spent this long typing about this, you know it’s left a mark on my circuit board.   I’m bound to offend you again but it won’t be in the same way, and it will be an accident then, too.  This time, it was because I was focused on a story that had nothing to do with the “issue” we’re discussing.  I cut corners. There was probably a way to do the same episode while somehow quickly and efficiently reminding the audience that gay people are just people that are gay and come in all kinds of flavors other than gay in addition to their gayness.  

If you weren’t offended, don’t bother being offended by the people being offended.  They’re not doing anything wrong.  I don’t think anyone that “complained” was asking for Community to be censored or for it to become a schmaltzy PC pile of shit.  I think they were asking me to stick a post-it note on my brain regarding the situation, which I can do without making the show any less brilliant or funny. It will be all the moreso the more I continue to care about the audience’s experience.

See you on Thursday.

From the room in which Remedial Chaos Theory was broken by Chris McKenna and writers.  I’m sorry, that’s not accurate.  The room in which Chris McKenna and writers were broken by Remedial Chaos Theory.  Thank you so much for your patience and sacrifices, guys.

(this is a post for Community fans, clarifying an odd rumor about a recent episode.  No need to read more if you’re not absurdly obsessed with our show).

I have been trying not to read reviews, and especially the discussions under them, this season, as I have become emotionally fused with our TV show in a way that makes it hurt every time someone says it’s not perfect.  However, there was so much discussion about this week’s episode that I have seen a few reviews, now, courtesy of provocatively captioned links sent to my twitter, etc.

There is this one particular pet theory circulating that, as a populist TV producer, I can’t allow to be out there without being on record firmly denying.  To tell you the truth, I’m not sure I fully understand the theory itself, but I know it’s not true at a glance, because it has something to do with the episode “Competitive Ecology” being aired out of order on purpose because it was actually “from the timeline in which Abed gets the pizza in Remedial Chaos Theory.”

It’s just not true.  I am really sorry that the air-order-swap has sent a false signal of hidden complexity.  I have been meaning to explain the very unmysterious reason for the air order swap when I had time, in keeping with a promise I made you guys long ago.

The production code of “Remedial Chaos Theory” is 303, because it was the third episode to be written and shot.  We intended to air it third.  Troy and Abed’s apartment is 303 because, hey, we needed an apartment number, so we gave it the production code’s number.

As you MIGHT imagine, 303 was a bit of a challenge to write, shoot and edit.  And as you might imagine, the episode entitled “Competitive Ecology” was relatively easy to write, shoot and edit.  Relative to 303, anyway.

At a certain point, with 303’s delivery deadline looming, I panicked.  I felt that the episode was nowhere near complete.  Chris McKenna had invested so much into the episode, and we were about to lock picture on something that was not delivering on this script that had nearly given him a stroke.  And an early director’s cut of Competitive Ecology came in, and I looked at it, and it was working great.  It was six hours from being broadcastable, and Chaos Theory needed an amount of TLC in the edit bay that I couldn’t even estimate.  I just knew we had to sit there and work on it.  A lot.

So I ordered the swap.  Not NBC.  I talked them into it.  We considered things like the Eartha Kitt contradiction, which some execs recommended pulling from 304, but I thought, perhaps erroneously, that it would feel like a “set up” for the fact that Pierce is constantly bringing it up.  We considered the “marijuana lighter” concept, and I decided that, you know what?  Shirley just already knew that Britta was a stoner, how could she not. 

One thing I did not consider was that fans starving for our weirdness were going to get back-to-back “normal episodes” with Chang-as-cop B stories, and that, in a season in which backlash is basically unavoidable, we were going to leap headlong into it, because everyone was going to start making decisions, as of the third episode, about how the season was going, etc.

It aired out of order because it was a bitch to edit.  I’m sorry it’s not more complicated than that, but I’m sure glad the explanation isn’t more sinister.  The “real” timeline - that is to say, the one which the NBC TV show Community will continue to track - is the timeline you see mapped at the center in those awesome transitions created by Channel 101’s Duncan Brothers.  That center, or “prime” timeline, is the one in which Abed catches the die, exposes Jeff as a selfish hooligan and the group sends him down for the pizza.  That is the “real” timeline.  And when we were not in it, I did everything I could to make it clear.  As much fun as we want to have, we never want to confuse you or lie to you.  We just don’t consider that a right that we have.  I hated that stupid “The Killing” show on AMC after the first five minutes; don’t show me someone discovering a body but then reveal that the camera was somewhere else and it was a pig.  That’s dumb.  That’s not storytelling, that’s a parlor trick and an abuse of power.  That kind of shit was cool in the third act of Silence of the Lambs, when she was ringing the doorbell and the SWAT team was ringing a doorbell and you suddenly realized that the SWAT team was at the wrong house and Starling wasn’t.  The “deception” in that moment was the POINT of that moment in Silence of the Lambs.  Starling had wandered from her flock, straight into the wolf’s den, and WE were the only ones that knew it.  That was a [very brief] lie the camera engaged in to EMPOWER the audience and make the story more riveting.  Wow.  What a tangent.  Anyway.

Is timeline 1 real?  Is Evil Abed out there?

Those are really, really good questions that I think only a really, really good show would answer.  Enjoy.

They are airing a rerun next thursday.  But the week after that is Halloween. 

It’s a fun one.

Your praise of Remedial Chaos Theory has got me feeling really good.  I have some pretty interesting stuff I could show you when I get a chance.  There’s photos of the whiteboard in the room where McKenna was breaking this story.  And there’s a text message conversation from last season between me and Megan “Marie Claire” Ganz in which you can see the seed for Remedial Chaos Theory get planted and then sprout.  Well, it fascinates me, anyway.  What else do I have to be fascinated by. 

I love you guys for loving that episode.  Talk to you soon.

While I’m sure all bad writers probably have a hard time writing, I’m equally certain that not all people having a hard time writing are bad writers (thank God).

The term “writer’s block” is, itself, the beginning of a self-defeating syndrome.  The idea that something is “in our way” presumes we know where we’re going, which presumes “we” we are responsible for our failures and successes, which only paralyzes us more.

I won’t presume to call writing “art,” but I will say this:  if it’s science, we’re the rat.  We are not the one with the plan or the map, we are down in the shit, learning through mistakes that are not our fault, cruising for rewards which are sadly therefore not to our actual credit.  But let’s not get nihilistic right when I’m about to activate you.

A rat would never get through a maze if it thought a rat’s job was to know which way to go.  The dead end is not the problem in need of solving, the hunger is, and the way to solve the hunger, the way to get the cheese, is to respect a wall for a wall.  To receive each obstruction as a message from the laboratory:  ”You’re not going this way.  Period.  Change direction.”

This, of course, is not the trademark thinking that got primates where we are today, so we have to use tricks to suspend our penchant for lateral thought, or at least to downgrade our ego to rat level.  Here are the tricks I’ve learned, in no necessary order:

Alcohol lowers your inhibitors across the board.  The same magic that sometimes enables you to start crying about your Dad for no reason can also enable you, briefly, to admit that you hate what you’re trying to write and why you hate it, and what you would therefore love to write.  And if you can write down these epiphanies in the sweet spot between euphoria and blackout, ten percent of the time you’ll have a new approach to your current job.  Booze, however, is the Agent Orange in the war against writer’s block.  It’s graceless, it’s ungodly and it’s not just foliage you’re damaging.  There’s prices to pay.  Forever.

Cutesy games, like iambic pentameter or “begin every sentence with the next letter of the alphabet,” can distract the logical part of your brain and let the creative side operate free of supervision.  I used these for most of my twenties, but there’s something pretentious about it.  Especially when you get frustrated that nobody noticed your iambic pentameter, because then you have to start pointing it out, and you become a huge dick.

Being behind a real deadline - one that involves you actually getting yelled at by rich people who might not pay you - works really well, but you won’t have that luxury until someone’s counting on you.  And no, “setting your own deadlines” doesn’t work.  Never has for me, anyway.

But here’s my favorite, and it seems like the most healthy one:

If you’re ever going to be a good writer, then you probably tend to be afraid you’re a bad writer.  Instead of trying to prove you’re good, try to prove you’re bad.  At least the ball will start MOVING on the field.  I always tell young writers, “start proving to yourself how bad you are.”  Make a joke out of it.  Write a draft that you know you’re going to throw in the garbage, or show to your friends for a laugh, a profanely irresponsible piece of shit draft that in which you absolutely fight for the team that you REALLY believe in - the one that says you stink.  Pretend your Mom keeps asking you “why don’t you just finish something,” and write the thing designed to shut her the fuck up.  THIS is why I don’t just do it, Mom, because it would look like THIS, this thing that SUCKS.  Show her.  Don’t even waste time on it, the faster you go, the more it will suck and the more you’ll win the fight against yourself.

Because the truth is, we do suck…because “we” is our ego, and our job is to get that ego to stop blocking us.

I hope that helps, it’s the best I could type while listening to network notes.  I think they even just busted me not listening, but this seemed more important at the time.  Godspeed to you, child, and all sympathy to your parents for not having raised an air conditioning repair person.

Get out your cell phone and scroll through the contacts until you come to a name that provokes a reaction inside of you.  Joy, rage, confusion, fascination, embarrassment, fear, frustration, infatuation, anything.

Ask yourself why that person’s name caused that reaction in you.  Don’t try to make it an accurate answer, make it your honest, personal answer.  Make it a thousand overlapping micro-answers.  Don’t find categorical terminology for any of it, just dump the marbles of emotional memory all over the floor, flood the room with them.  You were infatuated with Rebecca because she wore Chuck Taylors and played bass and tasted like cigarettes.  

Now play with the marbles.  Experiment with eliminating them, cross referencing them…didn’t Tracy also taste like cigarettes, and didn’t you hate that about her?  What if Rebecca had tasted like Scope, would you have been less in love with her…?

Sooner or later - and fight it for as long as you can, but let it happen when it can’t be fought anymore - some overall categorical conclusion about this person is going to fuse most of the marbles.  Let it be elegantly and ambiguously simple.  One word, the simplest word possible, it only has to mean something to you and you don’t even have to be sure of what it means.  Rebecca was dirty.

Let that be her nucleus and let any leftover, seemingly contradictory marbles orbit the clump, like electrons, but don’t let them mean as much as the nucleus.  

Put your Rebecca atom, with her three marble dirty nucleus and her one vegan electron, aside, and go back to your phone.  

Make a bunch of atoms this way.  Some of them might end up fusing into molecules (if you’re living right, Rebecca’s not the only dirty woman in your phone).  Some will remain independent and inert.  All of them will be simple characters with real, human growth potential.

Write your pilot before you know everything about these people.  Let the story establish little pieces of them, don’t fill your script with facts about fictional strangers, fill your script with things happening to fictional strangers.  Bring the atoms into collision and let your audience get glimpses of their nuclei as they repulse, neutralize and bond with each other.  If you are capable of knowing exactly who these people are by the end of your pilot, you are probably writing a bad TV show.  The good news being, I predict much success for you.

But if your goal is to create a TV character with depth, it’s the same as if your goal were to create a tree with height:  you’ll have to be patient and surrender a lion’s share of your control.  God doesn’t make a tree with hammer and nails.  He makes a seed.  Likewise, actors and audiences and time are the things that are going to give your characters depth, the best you can do as the writer of a pilot is provide the reader with evidence of that potential.

If you scroll back through this tumblr, I think I answered a similar question about character once, and talked at great length about my belief that every character should have something about them that will never change.  That might be a helpful thing to read, too.  And if it’s not helpful, hey, listen, YOUR REFUND IS IN THE MAIL, HOW DARE YOU. WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE QUESTIONING ALL THIS FREE INFORMATION ON CREATIVITY?!  Sorry I snapped at you.  Good luck.

Community Confession: I’m in love with Britta.

Elliot Smith’s No Name #1 on a loop.  Walled up in my office.  Let’s try to keep things light today.  Let’s just talk about work.  How’s your job going?  What do you do again?  You’re a nurse or something, right?  Okay, your time is up.  Talk about me again.

Should be a good season.  I think?  We did a table read of the Halloween episode yesterday.  I dudditz [STEPHEN KING’S DREAMCATCHER, 2003].  We all “dudd” all of the scripts together, but my name’s on the cover sheet of this one.  I think it’s a good script.  There’s one thing about it I don’t like but I’ll fix it today.  I think.  I can’t really figure it out.  I need inspiration.  I think if I just listen to this guy that stabbed himself in the chest singing “leave alone, you don’t belong here” a couple more times, I’ll come up with a pie fight.

We’re shooting the fourth episode of the third season right now.  You’re about a month away from seeing the first.  I haven’t seen a cut of it, yet.  So, all I’ve got are vague anxieties, and the comforting thought that I probably had the same vague anxieties last year, and everything turned out swell.  One of Erin’s most important functions was Dan Harmon Mood Archivist.  I could tell her I felt like a mediocre turd and she’d say “that’s how you felt last August,” and I’d take her word for it and it would make the mood feel less powerful.  She demystified me.  I could use a little demystification these days, but it’s got to come at my own hands or I’ll never get better.  I’ve got to be my own yardstick.

This is really not a good guy to be listening to on a loop.  The guy literally died from feeling what he’s singing right now.  This is the equivalent of rubbing bees on a bee sting.  Well, my hands are tied.  It’s just not a Who Let the Dogs Out morning.  And I can’t make it one by playing Who Let the Dogs Out.  

I could maybe make it one by actually letting some dogs out.  The answer to “Who Let the Dogs Out” would have to be “Dan” in order for that song to work on me, and I do not currently feel like a person that is capable of letting dogs out.  I could maybe leave a cage door open for a ferret, that’s it.  Who Let One Ferret Out?  Dan.  Dan Dan Dan.

I got nothing to say.  I thought if I started typing, something would happen.  This must be how you feel every day, huh, mister Nurse.  This is your whole life, walking around, made of solid gingerbread, nothing coming through.

What’s that?  You think I should take a 20 minute nap?  Okay.  You’re the nurse.  Sorry I implied you were made of solid gingerbread.  I’m sure you’re very special to someone.

Here is an image of what transpired for those that missed it.  Harmontown tickets may still be available at http://bit.ly/q5rtzm  Special thanks to @Mr_Hambone for putting this visual transcript together!