Dan Harmon was crying.
He'd been in a rather jovial and expansive mood all night, but as he took the stage for the latest recording of his podcast Harmontown the crowd erupted in cheers. That's when he broke.
"I walked onstage and immediately started crying," he cracked sarcastically into the microphone during Saturday's live podcast recording at the Bridgetown Comedy Festival in Portland, Oregon. "It's not because today's important. There are people in the world with leukemia. Why am I crying?"
Everyone knew why he was crying. (Probably.) The day before, NBC canceled Community, the brilliant but troubled sitcom created by the brilliant but troubled Harmon. The announcement came at one of the few times in the show's five-year career that its cancellation didn't seem like a foregone conclusion.
>'I walked onstage and immediately started crying. It's not because today's important. There are people in the world with leukemia. Why am I crying?'
Dan Harmon
Though lauded by critics and beloved by fans, Community never was a ratings success, and over its five seasons, its future was always touch-and-go. After Season 3, the network fired the famously volatile Harmon from his own show, only to bring him back a year later. Season 5 seemed like a victory lap for Harmon, free of network interference and praised by critics as nearly reaching the creative heights of its early episodes. Now, the show was within three episodes of the magical 100-episode milestone networks often aim for to secure the best syndication deals, and its fans' longtime rallying cry—"Six seasons and a movie!"—felt like a real possibility. Last week, an A.V. Club article noted Community "seems likely to get a sixth [season] (and maybe even beyond that)."
The next day Community was no more.
Thankfully, Harmon was in the perfect place to deal with this crisis. Community, with its odd sitcom beats and dark undertones and obscure references to alternate universes and My Dinner With Andre, always resembled one long, odd conversation between Harmon and his small but devoted fan base, and since 2011, he's expanded that conversation to include his live podcast called Harmontown. Each episode, which also features actor and comic Jeff Davis and Harmon's fiancée Erin McGathy, feels less like a pre-planned podcast and more like a rambling public confessional, with Harmon spouting off about anything and everything. It seemed obvious that here, at a taping of Harmontown, Harmon would open up for the first time about the cancellation of his show.
Harmon, in other words, was in his element. These were his people, his own version of a Greendale Community College study group. The audience packed into the small basement venue waited in line for over an hour to be here for him in his time of need, to comfort, to commiserate, to rail against the injustice. "It's bullshit about Community," grumbled a guy wearing a sweatshirt reading "Learn to Code." If Harmon said the word, he and all the others seemed ready to rise up and build a pillow fort from here to Los Angeles and lay siege to NBC, planting the triumphant flag of the Greendale Human Beings in the the smoking studio's remains and saving the world from the grips of the darkest timeline.
But that moment never came. Harmon never lamented, never railed, and never fully explained what comes next. He began by writing off his tears. "I'm crying because your donuts are great, you are a great city," he said, launching into a tale about the misadventures he's had in the city. Like usual, he, McGathy, and Davis spent some time continuing the Dungeons & Dragons campaign they've been playing within the show with the help of Spencer Crittenden, the dungeon master, pulled from the audience one night several years ago, who's become an ongoing part of Harmontown. As usual, throughout the taping Davis played hip-hop beats on his iPad and Harmon, fueled by cups of Ketel One on the rocks, freestyle rapped about having sex with somebody's mom.
There are lots of reasons a Community resurrection could be difficult. — Dan Harmon"Dan, let's not bury the lede!" interjected Davis nearly halfway through the episode. "Your show got canceled."
"We should address that, in due time," conceded Harmon, noting that, "The fans of that show have more reason to be upset than I do. I can go try to create another show. And also I got paid for every minute I cared about that show ... The people that are most devastated are people that put unpaid labor into the show." He elaborated on these feelings Monday on Tumblr, where he addressed the possibility of the show getting a revival and imploring fans not to take it too hard. "I'm scared to tell you how little a difference I think my enthusiasm will make. I know fandom, when it gets this deep for this long, becomes almost religious, including the urge to stone the less than faithful. But there are lots of reasons a Community resurrection could be difficult," he wrote. "I honestly think you can totally sit back and relax for this chapter. I know you don't feel relaxed but I mean you don't have to worry that someone on this planet isn't aware of this show's value to its audience."
During the taping, Davis pressed Harmon on the cancellation. "The fact that it is now done, how does that emotionally affect you?" he asks.
"It'll take weeks to sink in," Harmon said, then went back to rapping about violating moms.
Maybe the subject was too soon, too raw, for Harmon to talk about. Or maybe there was something else going on at this event. Great episodes of Community, after all, bury moving insights about the human condition deep within pop culture miscellanea: a stop-motion Christmas special is really about loneliness, a G.I. Joe cartoon rip-off is really about coming to grips with how little you've done with your life. So could Harmon have buried his thoughts and feelings about the end of Community within the ramblings of his podcast?
Maybe, for example, the story he told about two Portlanders who tried to pick a fight with them at a bar earlier was really a veiled reference to his troubles with network executives. Could the two hooligans, one of which apparently threatened to start "slicing faces," be stand-ins for the producers David Guarascio and Moses Port, who replaced Harmon when he was fired from Community? In truth, this is likely a stretch, considering that Guarascio and Port have always appeared incredibly deferential to Harmon, even noting in a New York Times article about his reinstatement that the show was "no doubt at its best with Dan running it." Plus, as far as anyone knows, the two never once tried to slice Harmon's face.
Maybe more telling was the moment during the D&D game when the group comes across a toilet, and Harmon decided to have his character, Sharpie Buttsalot, give it a go. McGathy's character, Mulrain Sidhanna, figured this was the perfect time for a heart-to-heart. "Sharpie, what do you want to achieve?" she asked as he sits on the commode.
"I'd like to touch other people," replied Harmon, in between bowel-movement sound effects. "I want them to know that I was here ... I don't need them to think that I was good or bad. I just want to be remembered, I just want to be specific. I want to be irreplaceable. I want to be singular... plop." Was Harmon channeling his own wants and needs, or was he just really getting into his character's existential bathroom visit?
Hard to tell. But at the end of the taping, Harmon launched into a particularly poignant rendition of Harmontown's closing theme. Unsteady from all the Ketel One, he climbed off the stage and waded into the crowd. As the audience clapped along and McGathy and Davis provided back-up vocals, singing "woah-oh, oh, oooh" from the stage, Harmon crooned the chorus: "In Harmontown, where the pee is yellow and the poop is brown." It was like a Springsteen show, just sloppier. At one point, to up the emotional stakes, Davis yelled out, "Community was cancelled, you guys. No more Community."
Harmon, unfazed, worked it into the song: "My show got cancelled last night/But we can still win the fight/I'll just do another show and it'll be alright." The crowd went wild. Like the end of most Community episodes, the whole thing was weird and touching and beautiful and a little sad. It’s easy to see why the show will be missed.
And here's the thing: Harmon didn't want the song to stop. "I'm too drunk to end the show!" he hollered.
"Show is over," declared Davis from the stage.
"No it's not!" cried Harmon in the midst of singing. "This show never ends! This never ends!"
Whatever exactly Harmon was referring to, the cheering crowd wholeheartedly agreed.
