Grantland’s Alex Pappademas recently hit the road with Dan Harmon, his girlfriend Erin McGathy, and various and sundry other people as they put on Harmontown, Harmon’s podcast, as a live national tour. Depending on the level of attention you’ve been paying to Harmon’s life and person outside his role as the creator of Community, reading the resulting chronicle of the trip will be either a profoundly dispiriting experience, or a reaffirmation of things you already knew. But the part of it I found perhaps most disconcerting was a long rant Harmon goes on about television that Pappademas reproduces in order to give readers a sense of “what it’s like to talk to Harmon, who’s one of the most exhaustingly brilliant people I’ve ever had a conversation with.” Harmon apparently said:

When 30 Rock lands on the cover of Rolling Stone, when any television show is lionized for being “smart,” someone’s laughing all the way to the bank — some company, it used to be General Electric, but now it’s Comcast. That there’s a difference between any of this shit is the greatest joke that television ever told. I mean, as the creator of Community, I’m telling you: It’s all garbage. And the idea that my garbage, y’know, needed a better time slot or deserved an Emmy or didn’t deserve an Emmy, the idea that it was better or worse than 30 Rock or Arrested Development or Freaks and Geeks and all that shit — you only have to take a couple steps back before you realize that you’re looking at a bunch of goddamn baby food made out of corn syrup. It’s just a big blob of fucking garbage. The medium is dispensed to people who can’t feed back, can’t change it, who only get it in 20-minute chunks interrupted by commercials, and you’re watching either really well-written jokes or so-so-written jokes or terribly written jokes, but you’re just watching jokes written by a bunch of people who all have one thing in common: They’re not allowed to say whatever they’re thinking! They’re not allowed. You’re definitely not getting truth; you’re getting lies.

Now, so why does this concept of “meta” and smart TV and snobbery — like, why does it offend people? Why can’t you just say, “I don’t like that show; it’s not my cup of tea. I prefer this show”? Because we’re programmed to hate ourselves for being stupid. We are told that the goal is to be smart, and to differentiate between good and bad, and then we are told, from left to right, what is good and bad, and then we are told to go at each other’s throats. And that’s why, if a television show like Community has an element to it where someone says, “This feels a lot like a television show,” you can’t just ignore that — you can’t just take it or leave it. You have to violently — like, it’s a political issue. It’s like, you gotta fight it; you gotta hate it.

If you’re a critic, you have to write your 90-page review of it that takes longer to read than it does to watch the episode, prattling endlessly in this pseudo-intellectual way, filling the next tier down’s head with this language that they can use to talk about the show over coffee. The conversation we’re not having is: “Hey, there’s 250 million of us watching an average of six hours a day of a one-way transmission that only ever tells us that we are all animals and that we should buy Cottonell.” That’s the one conversation no one is having, not a single one of us. Well, I mean, there are a couple people having it; they’re on street corners covered in tattoos with their dicks pierced, and they’re holding signs saying, “Honk if you want to burn down the White House.” Those people are not marketable; we put them in the same drawer as homeless people; they’re weird characters, putting flyers on your windshield and walking around barefoot and freaking out about the fact that this Orwellian nightmare is happening, and we’re all inside having these debates about whether or not liking 30 Rock makes us smart or stupid.

Now, I say everything that follows as someone who believes even more than the average, 90-page-review-writing, critic that television matters, that movies matter, hell, that Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series of romance novels is a delightful and important critique of the genre while also still being a successful example of it. So Dan Harmon can feel free to ignore as much of this as he chooses. But in my defense, I’m also someone who wrote a long meditation on NCIS and Americans’ relationship to government, so I’m not sure I’m guilty of trying to sort out whether I’m smart based on my love of both Anthony DiNozzo and Chris Traeger.

But beyond the questions of my investment in a system Harmon thinks is nonsense, and of Harmon’s own self-regard and how it pairs with his self-hatred—which was a striking element of this piece even for someone who suffers from substantial self-image dysmorphia—this…was not quite the visionary statement I expected? For all that it’s absolutely true that all television that is broadcast on cable or networks is produced in a corporate environment, to say that “It’s just a big blob of fucking garbage” is the equivalent of arguing that there’s no substantive difference beween the Democratic and Republican parties. It may be true that there isn’t as much variation as we’d like in the offerings available to us. But the corporate money that’s gone into our politics has actually homogenized the party system much more than the corporate money invested in television development has ever homogenized content—and the differences between the parties remain easily discernable. To stick with the comparison, there genuinely is a difference between the smarmy cynicism of House of Cards‘ garage-murdering, sex-having, amoral power brokers, and the optimism of Parks and Recreation‘s argument that local government can genuinely make life better.

And for all that television’s a one-way medium, it’s not alone—and it has more capacity to adapt over time than either novels or movies. Girls is to television as Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be is to novels, an almost pathologically open dispatch from a young woman’s perspective. While Heti’s novel will only ever be what it is, Girls has actually gotten substantially stranger in its second season, and more willing to test the limitations of our affections for its characters, whether Hannah’s upping the self-regard factor, or Jessa’s being called out as the golddigger that she is, even as the show expects us to continue to sympathize with her. Parks and Recreation actually got more optimistic about government, and more committed to showing its main character as competent and engagingly strange, after its first season, the opposite direction from the one you’d expect a corporately-controlled product to travel. The Wire may be the Great American Novel, but it also switched settings and main characters, growing and changing in a way a movie or novel never could have done.
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Since Dan Harmon’s dismissal as the showrunner of Community, the endearingly experimental sitcom he created for NBC, there’s been a vibrant discussion about that particular role in the television ecosystem. Are showrunners primarily creative visionaries? Replaceable management functionaries? Is the job a fundamentally ungainly hybrid? Have critics and fans focused too closely on showrunners at the expense of credit for other people behind the camera and in front of it? One thing that crossed my mind though, is that while the rise of the celebrity showrunner is due in part to the emergence of figures like David Chase, David Milch, David Simon and Matthew Weiner on cable, credit also goes to a show that both put a showrunner at its center, and warned us that they could be mercurial, unlikable, ineffective sellouts—and heroes none the less: 30 Rock.

When Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and Tina Fey’s 30 Rock premiered in the fall of 2006, the assumption is that Sorkin’s drama would crush Fey’s plucky sitcom. Sorkin’s vision of troubled geniuses with noble ambitions is in line with fans’ perception of Dan Harmon, or of Chase, or Milch, or Simon, or Weiner—and of course, with Sorkin’s sense of himself. They may be cranky, they may have serious problems relating to other people and managing themselves, but they are fundamentally heroes. Even though those basic ideas took hold, Sorkin’s show didn’t: Studio 60 died after a single season, while 30 Rock is headed grandly into its seventh and final year. Over time, debates about the show have come to center around Liz Lemon as feminist totem, exploring her sexuality, her work-life balance, her role as a forebear of the Lady Loser Comedy trend, and both the conversation and the show have moved away from the show’s initial subject: the ridiculousness and impossibility of having a single person try to wrangle a writers’ room, actors, and network executives.

In its pilot, 30 Rock acknowledged that there was something quixotic both about trying to get the public to care about people who make television, and once they were over that hurdle, expecting them to find genius or high-mindedness behind the scenes. We first hear Liz Lemon’s name when Kenneth Purcell, an NBC page, tries to convince a group touring 30 Rockefeller Plaza that he’s got a genuine treat in store for them. “Here’s someone you never get a chance to meet,” he tells them. “The head writer of The Girlie Show, Liz Lemon.” He applauds in a void—the only response from the tour group is a belch from a young boy. Liz later complains that Kenneth has embarrassed her by singling her out, and when she meets Tracy Jordan for lunch, she’s surprised when he recognizes her. Kenneth’s enthusiasm, his sense that she is someone special, is meant to be a joke.
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I don’t know whether there was a specific incident or specific set of incidents that led to Dan Harmon’s dismissal as showrunner of Community, and without knowing that, it’s impossible for me to say if that decision was fair or just. It does seem likely that the show without him will change considerably—a fellow critic suggested over dinner this weekend that Community’s heart will have to shift from Abed to someone else, because the other characters can be more easily kept alive and vibrant by writers other than Harmon. But while many questions about Community’s future remain, I feel pretty certain about one thing: it makes no sense, as some folks have suggested to me online, to pirate or delay watching Community beyond the time when you’d count as part of the audience because you want to punish NBC for Harmon’s dismissal.

First, there’s the question of whether it would even be effective. I tend to believe, as I’ve written before, that repeatedly telling Hollywood that piracy doesn’t actually hurt their bottom line gives content companies license to ignore people who do pirate content because they’ve been informed over and over again that pirates were never their potential customers in the first place. If NBC or Sony, which produces Community, and therefore shares responsibility for Harmon’s firing with the network on which his show has aired, does pay attention to a spike in pirated Community episodes, it’s more likely to be interpreted as a sign that even the angry audience is weak and unwilling to give up the show entirely. This is not a tactic that will move the hearts that broke Harmon’s.

Second, as much as Harmon’s singular vision has informed Community, he isn’t the only person who works on his creation. The actors who have turned in great work for the show, and who are at least publicly deeply distressed by Harmon’s departure, don’t deserve to be punished with declining ratings for a decision that’s beyond their control. If, under the new regime, they continue to turn in good, enjoyable work, it seems unfair to try to drive their chances of continuing to do that work into the ground, perhaps before they even know if they’d like to continue doing it.

And there are people other than Harmon who write Community. We should continue to give them credit if they continue to do good work even absent his tutelage. I’d particularly really like female writers like Megan Ganz and Annie Mebane to have creative and ratings success and to get credentialed by their work with a new regime of showrunners. As upsetting as Harmon’s firing is, I’d like to see people who share some of his wild and wonderful approach to television out there and succeeding to keep the flame he lit alive. Dan Harmon isn’t the only person working on Community I want to support, or keep an eye on to see what tremendously exciting things they do best. Dan Harmon isn’t the only person involved in Community who’s worth trying to keep the ratings up for so they’ll get renewed or have credibility pitching other shows in the future, particularly if you care about weird, smart, innovative, self-reflective television. Maybe pirating or driving down the ratings on those other people’s work will make someone out there feel like they’re in solidarity with Dan Harmon. But it isn’t an effective way to support the kind of work he’s given us for three years, or to make sure we see more like in the future.

Friday night newsbombs are a well-known and favored sneak attack strategy, but Sony Pictures Television outdid themselves this time by announcing Dan Harmon was fired from Community before he even knew about it, though there had been rumblings in the air over the last week. The showrunner and creator’s Tumblr post in response to the situation said:

Why’d Sony want me gone?  I can’t answer that because I’ve been in as much contact with them as you have.  They literally haven’t called me since the season four pickup, so their reasons for replacing me are clearly none of my business.

Finding out you’ve been fired by reading a breaking news item on an entertainment site has to sting, and Harmon came out swinging. He added that despite what Sony might have said about keeping him on as a consultant, he has no real interest in continued involvement with the show, given that:

However, if I actually chose to go to the office, I wouldn’t have any power there.  Nobody would have to do anything I said, ever.  I would be “offering” thoughts on other people’s scripts, not allowed to rewrite them, not allowed to ask anyone else to rewrite them, not allowed to say whether a single joke was funny or go near the edit bay, etc

I can’t really blame him for not wanting to sit on the sidelines while other people have control of his baby; he was gracious enough to note that the new showrunners are good folks, just that he didn’t want to be involved with the show on those terms. Having creative control wrested from you like that, especially in such a humiliating way, is not really an indicator that the network cares intensely about your continued involvement. And that means his role as consultant would be essentially ornamental more than anything else.

Harmon has a reputation for being “hard to work with,” not uncommon for creators. He’s focused and driven and demanding, and always thinks his team can do better. There’s speculation that this working style may be behind his unceremonious ejection from the show, given that networks usually frown on cost overruns and late scripts, both of which Harmon was guilty of at times. Yet, his meticulous approach to handling the show, and his extremely hands-on method, may be what makes Community so adored by fans. The cult hit has a huge following that’s clearly drawn to something and Harmon’s obvious stamp on the work is playing a key role in the reception of the show.

It may not be a ratings king, but Community occupies a special place in the hearts of its viewers. Harmon may be down in this case, but he’s definitely not out for good; he’s got too many ideas bouncing around in his head to throw in the towel just yet and I expect we’re going to see a lot more work from him in the future.

What intrigues me about Harmon’s working style is that it’s more than just the “difficult creator” stereotype.

He’s also on the autism spectrum, as detailed in this interview with Wired last year. His very demanding, orderly, focused approach makes much more sense to me in this context, as does his agitation when his routines are disrupted and he’s forced to deviate from his working style. Harmon isn’t simply unreasonably demanding and difficult because he’s bitten by the creative bug; he’s actually compelled by fundamental differences in the wiring of his brain.

The same differences that undoubtedly contribute to his brilliance as a creator. That’s the thing with being on the spectrum. You can’t separate out the autistic and non-autistic parts of yourself into neat categories. You get a complete package, and that means you develop fixations and obsessions right along with the creative leaps that make your work stand out as quirky, experimental, and unusual. Harmon’s work isn’t typical because he’s not typical, and taking him off the team at Community could be a profound error if the network has any interest in continuing to keep the show going.

What he brings to the show can’t be replaced with just any showrunner, because Harmon’s got something unique he’s bringing to the table.

Harmon’s story intrigues me because he’s one of the very few people in Hollywood openly discussing disability and identifying with it. The representation of people with disabilities in Hollywood—as actors, creators, producers, showrunners, or anything else—is absolutely abysmal. The inclusion of people with disabilities in the writing room is especially important because that’s what results in better representation on the screen. When people actually living the experience are writing it, it shows; it shows with Abed, for example, with whom Harmon identifies in many ways.

By dismissing Harmon from the show in an incredibly abrasive and abrupt way—one bound to upset anyone but especially someone on the spectrum who enjoys order and control in his life—the network did more than say that it didn’t want Harmon involved with the show anymore. It also sent a signal to other disabled producers and creatives, a warning that if they don’t play nicely, they, too could be checking their phones after a flight and finding out they’re fired.

After I posted some thoughts yesterday about Dan Harmon’s reflections on last week’s episode of Community, he was kind enough to get in touch to address some of my concerns. “I didn’t want to be sitcom number 5 to have a token gay that was either ‘progressively’ bland or ‘refreshingly’ flamboyant,” he tweeted at me, adding, “And I’m politically nauseated by the concept of TV as Wizard of Oz, giving one group a heart, another a brain, etc.”

I agree, of course — whatever subset of gay men who live to make over heterosexual women is more than adequately represented in mass media. Tropes are always the thin edge of the wedge when you’re trying to open the door to better representations of minority groups in all of their diversity, and if we get stuck on the tough black copy, the gay hairdresser, the Muslim cabdriver, we’re failing, both at representing our country and in telling stories. Consistent with that belief, I suggested that “there’s space between those two options, isn’t there?” And Harmon responded, “Yes, there is plenty in between. Everything is in between. That’s what Community is usually implying, hence the apology.”

I said, in a series of tweets that followed (helpfully curated here by Eleanor at PopChange), something I perhaps should have made clearer, that Community shouldn’t bear sole responsibility for making our conversations about all kinds of bias:

I love Community for its commitment on race, in particular, to have an ongoing conversation between actual stakeholders in a way that’s beautifully uncliche. I want more shows to proceed from that basis, that we live in an increasingly diverse world and have to resolve and work out our biases directly with the people influenced by them. And I don’t think you should have to do all the work. Hopefully other people will expand on the model you’ve set.

It’s tempting to look to folks like Harmon who are open to good-faith conversations about their work, and whose work can be usefully progressive, and demand that they be perfect about everything. But getting a few people to purity isn’t really the goal here, or at least not the only goal. We’ll fail if we’ve got a few islands of smart television that’s thought about race, gender, and sexual orientation in an ocean of regressive entertainment. It’s easy to talk to Dan Harmon about how he sees diversity. It’s harder, and even more important, to find a way to talk to folks who are aggressively closed to conversation, or aren’t aware that one’s going on at all.

Because even though The Sarah Silverman Program isn’t really my thing, it’s important, and he helped get it off the ground.

Because he sat down with the AV Club and gave a four-hour long interview that’s kind of about the second season of his television show, but really is about Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Because he’s interested in “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.” And says things like “I have class issues. I hate rich people so badly that I wanna become one really bad.”

Because people with big ideas about myth who choose to work in popular forms are kind of my heroes.

Because he can talk honestly about how frustrated he was when NBC told him to get more women in his writers’ room—and then acknowledge that it turned out to be fantastic and changed the way he thinks about comedy (even if I think he’s really wrong on race in the same paragraphs).

Because when fandom is the new Shriners, he’ll be hailed as a visionary, and people will understand that Community is the new Bowling Alone.