Community is the only current sitcom I’m watching, and I really like it; it’s a show that feels like it’s constantly learning about itself and improving from that learning — like, noticeably so, from one episode to the next (with some stumbles) — because it finds itself to be fascinating and a rich subject of study. So it doesn’t surprise me that creator Dan Harmon, who no doubt has studied the show more than anyone, has a ton of insightful things to say about it, as he does in this massive Onion AV Club interview with Todd Van Der Werff, in which Harmon comments on every single episode from Community Season Two: part one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Nor does it come as a shock that there’s a fine line between insightful and insufferable. But somehow that just makes it even more entertaining and fascinating. It’s very funny and rewarding to imagine this interview as a continuous monologue issued by an prodigiously coked-up but actually really smart and creative dude who’s cornered you at a party after you simply asked him “So how’s the show going?”, where there’s no escape but you don’t really even want to escape, you just wanna hear where it’s all headed, and years later you still think about the four hours you spent listening to this guy. I think it’s making a lot of people uncomfortable, this interview — at times it made me uncomfortable — because we want artists to be Goldilocks and put just the right amount of care and effort and obsession and self-doubt into what they’re doing, or at least show us just the right amount. Harmon blows right past that like Chuck Yeager breaking the sound barrier. He goes way, way, way, way out there in this. Reading it is a truly singular experience.

Tags: TV

This entry was posted on Friday, June 10th, 2011 at 10:25 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.