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Dan Harmon
Dan Harmon (27931105063) cropped.jpg
Harmon in 2016
Born
Daniel James Harmon

(1973-01-03) January 3, 1973 (age 51)
Alma mater Glendale Community College
Occupation
  • Writer
  • producer
  • actor
Years active 1996–present
Spouse(s)
Erin McGathy
(m. 2014; div. 2015)

Daniel James "Dan" Harmon (born January 3, 1973) is an American screenwriter and producer. He is best known as the creator and producer of the NBC sitcom Community (2009–2015), creator and host of the comedy podcast Harmontown (2012–2019), co-creator of the Adult Swim animated sitcom Rick and Morty (2013–present) and its subsequent franchise along with Justin Roiland, and co-founder of the alternative television network and website Channel 101 along with Rob Schrab.

Early life

Daniel James Harmon was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on January 3, 1973. He graduated from Brown Deer High School in Brown Deer, Wisconsin, and attended Marquette University. He briefly attended Glendale Community College in Glendale, California, an experience which would later form the basis of his sitcom Community.

Career

Early career (1996–2008)

DanHarmonMar10
Harmon in March 2010

Harmon was a member of ComedySportz in Milwaukee, alongside Rob Schrab, a member of the sketch troupe The Dead Alewives. They produced an album, Take Down the Grand Master, in 1996. Harmon frequently appeared at Milwaukee's Safehouse free comedy stage early in his career.

Harmon co-created the television pilot Heat Vision and Jack (starring Owen Wilson and Jack Black) and several Channel 101 shows, some featuring Black, Drew Carey, and Sarah Silverman. He co-created Comedy Central's The Sarah Silverman Program and served as head writer for several episodes.

Harmon portrayed a highly fictionalized version of Ted Templeman on two episodes of the Channel 101 web series Yacht Rock, a satirical history of soft rock, featuring stories about Templeman's collaborations with The Doobie Brothers, Michael McDonald and Van Halen. He was the creator, executive producer, and a featured performer in Acceptable.TV, a Channel 101-based sketch show airing for eight episodes in March 2007 on VH1. He and Rob Schrab co-wrote the screenplay for the Academy Award-nominated film Monster House. He is credited with writing part of Rob Schrab's comic book series Scud: The Disposable Assassin, as well as the spin-off comic series La Cosa Nostroid.

Community (2009–2012; 2014–2015)

In 2009, Harmon's sitcom Community, inspired by his own community college experiences, was picked up by NBC to be in its fall lineup. Harmon served as executive producer and showrunner for 3 seasons until May 18, 2012, when it was announced that Harmon was being terminated from his position on Community as a result of creative conflicts between himself and Sony executives. On June 1, 2013, Harmon announced that he would be returning to Community, serving as co-showrunner along with Chris McKenna; this was confirmed by Sony Pictures on June 10. NBC cancelled the show after its fifth season in May 2014, after which Harmon announced on June 30, 2014, that Yahoo! had renewed the series for a 13-episode sixth season to air online on Yahoo! Screen.

Harmontown and Harmonquest (2011–2019)

Dan Harmon (14718453571)
Harmon in 2014

On May 23, 2011, Harmon began hosting a monthly live comedy show and podcast at Meltdown Comics in Hollywood called Harmontown. After his firing from Community, the show became weekly. The show is co-hosted by Jeff B. Davis. Notably, Harmontown has featured a regular segment where the hosts played an ongoing campaign of pen-and-paper role-playing games, first Dungeons & Dragons, and later Shadowrun, with the help of show Game Master Spencer Crittenden. The segment inspired the Seeso original animated series HarmonQuest. The show has featured guests such as Kumail Nanjiani, Curtis Armstrong, Bobcat Goldthwait, Mitch Hurwitz, Aubrey Plaza, Eric Idle, Greg Proops, Jason Sudeikis, Zoe Lister-Jones, Ryan Stiles, as well as Harmon's then-wife, podcaster Erin McGathy. Harmon and Davis took the show on tour in early 2013, broadcasting from Austin, Nashville, Somerville, Massachusetts, Brooklyn, Rhode Island, and more. The tour became the subject of a documentary produced by director Neil Berkeley that follows Harmon, Davis, McGathy, and Crittenden. The documentary, also called Harmontown, premiered at the Austin Film Festival SXSW on March 8, 2014. On September 10, 2019, the Harmontown Twitter account announced that the podcast would be coming to an end, and its final episode was published on December 5, 2019.

Starburns Industries (2010–2020)

During the first season of Community, Harmon also co-founded Starburns Industries with several people including Dino Stamatopoulos, who played a character called Star-Burns on Community. In its first year, the company produced a stop-motion episode of Community which garnered the company an Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Animation. Starburns Industries was then involved in the creation of Rick and Morty and animated films Anomalisa and Bubbles. It has also produced season 2 of Mary Shelley’s Frankenhole and the special Beforel Orel for Adult Swim, HarmonQuest for Seeso and VRV and Animals for HBO.

In 2013, Harmon published the book You'll Be Perfect When You're Dead.

Harmon left the company in 2020. The studio's output declined steadily after the departure, with their only released projects after 2020 being The Freak Brothers and Slippin' Jimmy.

Rick and Morty (2013–present)

Harmon and co-showrunner Justin Roiland began developing ideas for an animated show during Harmon's yearlong break from Community. For its fall 2012 season, Adult Swim ordered a 30-minute animated pilot from Harmon and Roiland. The pilot, Rick and Morty, is about the adventures of a brilliant but mean-spirited inventor and his less-than-genius grandson. The show premiered on December 2, 2013, and was renewed for second and third seasons. The series' fourth season concluded in May 2020. Harmon voiced the recurring character of Bird Person. In May 2018, Rick and Morty was renewed for a further 70 episodes after Harmon and Roiland came to an agreement with Adult Swim. In January 2023, Harmon became the sole showrunner after Roiland was dismissed from the series amidst domestic assault charges.

The Sirens of Titan and Krapopolis

It was announced through the online site The A.V. Club in July 2017 that Harmon and Evan Katz would adapt Kurt Vonnegut's 1959 novel The Sirens of Titan into a television series. As of October 2021, no more details have been released.

In June 2020, it was announced that Fox has greenlit an animated comedy series from Harmon. The series will be set in Ancient Greece and is a co-production between Fox Entertainment and Bento Box Entertainment. On May 17, 2021, it was announced that the series would be titled Krapopolis. The series will be the first fully-owned new-Fox series.

Writing style

"Story circle" technique

Harmon adapted the hero's journey, a well-known storytelling framework, for use in television; he calls this technique the "story circle". He began developing the technique while stuck on a screenplay in the late 1990s, and wanted to codify the storytelling process to unveil the "structure" that powers movies and TV shows. He said, "I was thinking, there must be some symmetry to this. Some simplicity." While working on Channel 101, he found that many of the directors he was working with claimed that they were unable to write plots for television shows. This prompted him to simplify Joseph Campbell's structure of the hero's journey into a circular eight-step process that would reliably produce coherent stories.

Dan Harmon Story Circle
Dan Harmon's "Story Circle"

The story circle can supposedly be applied to all stories. Harmon uses it whenever he is writing a new story, saying, "I can't not see that circle. It's tattooed on my brain." The circle is divided into eight segments, each representing a stage of the plot: a character is introduced, wants something, enters a new environment, adapts to that environment, achieves their goal, encounters problems as a result of this, leaves that world, and is changed as a result. He writes the steps as follows:

  1. A character is in a zone of comfort or familiarity.
  2. They desire something.
  3. They enter an unfamiliar situation.
  4. They adapt to that situation.
  5. They get that which they wanted.
  6. They pay a heavy price for it.
  7. They return to their familiar situation.
  8. They have changed as a result of the journey.

Campbell's structure of the hero's journey is the main influence in Harmon's technique. In a blog post detailing the second sector of the circle, Harmon explained, "The point of this part of the circle is, our protagonist has been thrown into the water and now it's sink or swim. In Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell actually evokes the image of a digestive tract, breaking the hero down, divesting him of neuroses, stripping him of fear and desire. Asthma inhalers, eyeglasses, credit cards, fratty boyfriends, promotions, toupees, and cell phones can't save you here. The purpose here has become refreshingly—and frighteningly—simple." The hero's journey has been adapted for screen and television writing before, most notably by former Disney developmental executive Christopher Vogler in his book The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers. Harmon has noted this book as an influence on the technique, as well as the work of Syd Field. Star Wars is an example of a film that consciously set out to use the hero's journey as a template for storytelling success.

Harmon states that this circular structure of storytelling can be applied both to film and TV, suggesting in a Channel 101 blog that only the final intentions are different: "A feature film's job is to send you out of the theatre on a high in 90 minutes. Television's job is to keep you glued to the television for your entire life. This doesn't entail making stories any less circular (TV circles are so circular they're sometimes irritatingly predictable). It just means that the focus of step 8 is less riling-things-up and more getting-things-back-to-where-they-started." He has used the story circle technique extensively throughout projects such as Community and Rick and Morty. In an interview with Collider, writer Adam Chitwood said, "Rick and Morty debuted in 2013 to a serious degree of anticipation, as it marked a new animated venture for Community creator Dan Harmon, but it was the marriage of Harmon's adeptness for structure and character and co-creator Justin Roiland's insanely creative/sometimes insane mind that made Rick and Morty much more than just another animated TV series for adults."

Influences

In an interview with Vulture, Harmon named a number of films, television shows, books, and artists that have shaped his writing style. This includes the films RoboCop and Network; the television shows Cheers, Mr. Show, Arrested Development, Second City Television, and Twin Peaks; the books Slaughterhouse-Five and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; and writers, artists, and comedians including Garry Shandling, George Lucas, Spalding Gray, Charlie Kaufman, Woody Allen, Tom Kenny, and Chris Elliott.

In the same Vulture interview, Harmon mentioned Dungeons & Dragons, musician Tori Amos, and evolutionary anthropologist Elaine Morgan as influences. He singled out Morgan's aquatic ape hypothesis, calling it a "peaceful, interesting, mythical concept, and a scientific one, that maybe the origin of Homo sapiens was kind of a fairy tale". For Rick and Morty, Harmon and co-creator Justin Roiland listed a number of influences on the show's style, including , Saturday Night Live, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Doctor Who, and the cult sci-fi film Zardoz.

Awards

In July 2009, Harmon was nominated in two Emmy categories for his part in writing the 81st Academy Awards telecast: Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special and Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics, the latter of which he was awarded for "Hugh Jackman Opening Number" at the 61st Primetime Emmy Awards.

In 2018 and 2020, Harmon won the Emmy for "Outstanding Animated Program" as the executive producer of Rick and Morty.

He was also nominated with Chris McKenna for a Hugo award for writing the Community episode, "Remedial Chaos Theory".

Personal life

In 2011, while writing the character Abed for Community, Harmon realized through researching the character's traits that he might have Asperger syndrome. He consulted a doctor about it and concluded that he himself is on the spectrum. On a podcast hosted by Kevin Pollak, he said, "I know I'm not normal, but I think the important thing is that [...] I started to discover that I had a lot more in common with Abed than I did with Jeff."

Harmon proposed to his girlfriend Erin McGathy in December 2013, and they were married in November 2014. They announced they were divorcing in October 2015. In 2016, Harmon started dating TV writer Cody Heller. In January 2019, Heller proposed to Harmon and the couple are now engaged. Heller adapted a real-life experience with Harmon into the TV series Dummy, starring Anna Kendrick as Heller and Donal Logue as Harmon.

Filmography

Film

Year Title Role Notes
2006 Monster House N/A Writer
2008 Kung Fu Panda N/A Uncredited writer
2014 Harmontown Himself Documentary; also executive producer
2015 Knight of Cups Dan Uncredited
Back in Time Himself Documentary
2016 Doctor Strange N/A Uncredited consultant
2018 Seven Stages to Achieve Eternal Bliss Cartwright
TBA Community: The Movie N/A Writer

Television

Year Title Role Notes
1999 Heat Vision and Jack N/A Pilot; creator and writer
2003 Computerman Eugene Murzowski Also creator, writer and executive producer
2006 Tenacious D: Time Fixers Heckler Promotional short film; writer
2006 MTV Video Music Awards 2006 N/A Television special; writer
2007 Acceptable.TV Various roles Also co-creator, writer and executive producer
2007–2010 The Sarah Silverman Program N/A Co-creator and writer
2008 Googas Dan Also co-creator, writer
Spike Video Game Awards 2008 N/A Television special; writer
2009 The 81st Annual Academy Awards N/A Television special; writer
2009–2015 Community N/A Creator
Writer and executive producer (season 1–3; 5–6)
Executive consultant (season 4)
2012 Mary Shelley's Frankenhole Dr. Jekyl (voice) 5 episodes
2013–present Rick and Morty Birdperson / additional voices Also co-creator, writer and executive producer
2013 Arrested Development Yurt Clerk Episode: "Borderline Personalities"
Axe Cop Audience Member (voice) Episode: "Babysitting Uni-Baby"
2015 ... History Narrator Episode: "Miami"
The Simpsons N/A Episode: "Mathlete's Feat"; wrote couch gag
2016 Great Minds with Dan Harmon Himself Also writer and executive producer
2016–2019 HarmonQuest Himself / Fondue Zoobag / Limerick O'Shift Also creator, writer and executive producer
2017 Dr. Ken Himself Episode: "Ken's Big Audition"
Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return N/A Writer
Animals. Ad Man 1 Episode: "Humans."
The Simpsons Himself (voice) Episode: "Springfield Splendor"
Good Game Suit Also executive producer
2022 Little Demon N/A Executive producer
2023–present Strange Planet N/A Co-creator and executive producer
Krapopolis N/A Creator and executive producer

Web series

Year Title Role Notes
2017 Guest Grumps Himself (director) Episode: "The Cat in the Hat with Special Guest Dan Harmon"

See also

Kids robot.svg In Spanish: Dan Harmon para niños

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