What Makes Dan Harmon Different

[Music] what's up guys michael here it's no secret that the wisecrack team loves dan harmon whether he's getting weirdly existential existence is paying to a mesa explorer sending a study group on a world historical game of flores lava harmon's brand of weird humor has kept us entertained for over a decade but what is it that makes his work so distinctively harmonesque to the point where his being kicked off a season of community resulted in a markedly different show we think we figured it out and it has everything to do with his unique take on characters and we don't just mean stuff like this me morty jerry beth mr poovey butthole and summer join us as we dig into what makes harman's work unique in this wisecrack edition on how dan harmon writes a character and spoilers ahead for lots of sitcoms before we get into it i want to take a second to talk about wisecracks patreon and how it can help you connect with your own study group of sorts full of characters who would seem right at home on any harmon show well maybe just community but you get the point wisecrack patrons get awesome perks like early access to ad-free versions of all of our videos a private discord server for wisecrack fans to hang out and chat about everything from video games to hiking to of course philosophy and regular patron only streams where we chat about recent wisecrack content tell you about upcoming videos before anyone else and occasionally play games like siblings or dating it's a real thing i swear and membership start at just two dollars which is cheaper than a cheesy gordita crunch best of all the community you'll find on the wisecrack patreon will help you feel like you have a new family that has zero expectations for you to grow as a person or learn any life-changing lessons so probably better than your actual family so go to patreon.com wisecrack today to check it out now back to the show i can tell life from tv jeff tv makes sense it has structure logic rules and likable leading man in life we have this we have you to understand what makes dan harmon's character so distinctive we have to understand how in many ways they're exactly what you'd find in 99 of classic sitcoms with a major dose of his sad bearded energy let's start with a classic rule of tv sitcoms characters don't change we tune in week after week expecting to see approximately the same people getting up to approximately the same antics rather than explicitly undergoing some kind of transformation they typically develop something scholar roberta pearson calls character accumulation that's the process when we learn new traits or quirks about a character that remain consistent with our existing concept of them as say a weird and horny teenager you know i thought that robot over there looked pretty cool you know that's not to say the spirit of change is explicitly absent tv sitcoms often dangle the promise of change in front of us without actually delivering it's what scholar jason middle calls character education that is where a character learns something about themselves and promises to change i've learned something today however he writes those lessons rarely stick and we return to a narrative status quo each week of course tv has gotten more complicated in recent decades and we do see more and more exceptions to the rule via longer term character education and character growth i.e maturation this is most explicitly demonstrated on the good place which bakes education and growth into its plot by structuring much of the series around the character's collective quest to become good these changes tend to increase audience sympathies like when a literal demon learns to be human i'll say this to you my friend with all the love in my heart and all the wisdom of the universe take it sleazy other shows may indicate character growth near the tail end of the series like when a rude paper salesman mellows out into a slightly less rude regional manager but harman puts his own spin on the formula at first glance this might not seem obvious in community his writing often steers into classic sitcom archetypes giving us a set of characters who on the surface feel recognizable if a whole lot more meta i have a placeholder so set up and makes analogies look like punch lines my setup lacks awareness but my punchline doesn't know abusively cynical one-liner dismissing everything you just said absurd reaction just like in a traditional sitcom we see character accumulation via the choices these characters make that help us understand their true nature even when the choice is just to gets the pizza just so you know jeff you were not creating six different timelines of course i am on that but the interesting thing about this brand of character accumulation is that it often demonstrates the true depths of characters dysfunctions when abed has a christmas themed breakdown where he and his friends turn into claymation characters we realize the severity of his abandonment issues the revelation isn't a nice sitcom-style moment of clarity about abed overcoming his dysfunction mommy's moved on new family new life but more of a claymation method of showing us how complex characters and real people can be harman also sometimes uses character accumulation to demonstrate the outright bad inner nature of his characters subverting her expectations of sitcom characters to be deep down good people so for example almost everything pierce says how was i supposed to know it was a handicap's face because the man in the wheelchair was yelling it oh yeah and he doesn't have an agenda and in the case of chang we see a bad character supposedly redeem himself only to learn that he's just playing an evil long con and when the works accidentally go off when i hit the final note of my awesome keytar solo they'll burn up the school's records and all evidence of my misdeeds but the most satisfying way harmon messes with tropes is in his treatment of character education his characters may go through the same process of encountering a problem and attempting to solve that problem the wrong way but they skip the last part learning a lesson or changing in a meaningful way harmon plays with his trope by explicitly assuring the audience that his characters have not changed when we think a harmon character has become better over the course of an episode chances are they'll prove our assumptions wrong before the credits roll in rick and morty's vat of acid episode rick appears to have reflected on his defensive actions after morty criticizes his fake vat of acid sorry i just i lash out sometimes i i don't know why i do that i'm so ashamed of myself hearing you talk about the vat it really opened my eyes like what the [ __ ] am i even doing he even goes out of his way to create a place saving device that lets morty do whatever he wants his self-reflection seems like a genuine moment of character revelation only for the true horrifying revelation to come later you see morty you weren't saving your place and going back the only real hitch is that there was already a u in each probable dimension so we had to solve for that i gave you a choice you could listen to me explain in great scientific detail how it all works or you could have fun did you have fun morty is this because of the vet no this backsliding where characters appear to develop but quickly showcase their lack of development is common for harmon's characters especially those like rick and the previously mentioned senor chang and it's precisely these dysfunctions that make harmon's characters oddly relatable as messed up people who don't ever really change are much more reflective of the world around us than scrappy upstarts to ostensibly learn a lesson over the course of 22 minutes i'm sorry harmon takes his characters off the endless cycle of encounter a problem make a mistake learn rinse and repeat next week in this way he plays with sitcom rules to make characters that feel dynamic and surprising got into this mess by thinking there was such a thing as better people pierce admitted he was flawed and he died rich another way harman messes with conventional sitcom storytelling is the way he builds romantic relationships specifically by giving us unfulfilling and largely inconsequential love stories typical sitcom romantic storylines usually feature two attractive characters gradually getting together in a fashion that feels inevitable whether it's the classic on-again again romance teen ross and rachel slow burn off his romances like jake and amy or jim and pam or a classic love triangle scenario we're used to these storylines ending the same with romantic climax often in a season finale before settling down in a fulfilling long-term relationship harmon's romantic arcs have less of a will there won't they vibe and more of a please god i hope they don't sitcom rules usually dictate that the two hottest characters get together and settle down or as shirley puts it i don't see why you and britta aren't together two cute white people going to school together just seems right but what we see in harmon shows is vastly different instead of using romance to anchor the plot and keep audiences invested harman uses it to showcase the dysfunctions of his characters how am i gonna die with her if i can't even talk to her for starters his love interest aren't entirely likable and sometimes they're not even people i i don't understand isn't it obvious morty i [ __ ] the planet in place of the classic romantic leads we're used to we get a failed lawyer who lies to get what he wants i i would say anything to get what i want and i i want you to like me so uh or a slacktivist who seems completely uninterested wait so so this is a game to you you put human beings into a state of emotional shambles for a shot at getting in my pants instead of high school sweethearts we get two people who happen to go to high school together well you're that girl like i hooked on pills and then dropped out you're little annie adderall because and you're a stupid jock who lost a scholarship by dislocating both shoulders in a keg stand keg flip they're very hard to pull off and then they end up as nothing more than friends and that's without even mentioning the host of disturbing romantic interests in rick and morty several of whom appear to be adult women interested in dating a teenage boy you weren't a 14 year old boy from the midwest who ran away from his family and capitalized on his lack of conscience by becoming a stock broker whether they're part of the main cast or just in a couple of episodes harmon's characters aren't set up to be likable romantic leads they're set up to feel real often a romantic storyline ends with the realization that a character is better off without their love interest like when rick's lack of maturity prompts an entire hive mind to go off the rails i realize now that i'm attracted to you for the same reason i can't be with you you can't change and i have no problem with that but it clearly means i have a problem with myself harman also intentionally deconstructs our notions of a happily ever after now what happily ever after and after that we'll find out he frequently shows us couples who for no apparent reason just don't work out by repeatedly breaking sitcom romantic formulas harman reflects the reality that people don't always find their perfect match jeff we need to talk what's wrong are you breaking up with me oh maybe we don't need to talk and the fact that romances are rarely the centerpiece of an episode reflects the reality most sitcoms refuse to address that life is about a lot more than just finding the one by refusing to put romance's center stage harmon is showing us that we're not made complete by finding the perfect romantic partner and that friendship might be just as valuable all i ever wanted in high school was for troy barnes to notice me then i ended up living with you i'm pretty lucky i'm not i had a chance to be your friend in high school but i was too busy trying to be cool i missed out on four more years of annie so what if anything is harman trying to teach us with this unorthodox take on sitcom tropes other than setting some sort of record for most sociopaths on a single sitcom of course well for classic sitcoms their primary purpose is simply entertainment whether it happens by making us laugh cry smile or cringe but while being entertaining sitcoms often try to teach us lessons through a character's episodic journeys as previously noted most sitcoms central characters start an episode faced with a problem which ends up teaching them an unexpected lesson along the way these lessons are typically easy to understand and used to showcase bite-sized character education within episodes like this episode of scrubs where dr cox struggles to accept the death of a friend but by the end is able to cope with his loss and mourn thanks to the help of his hospital buddies with harman not so much his sitcoms aren't completely devoid of lessons or meaningful commentary stop making our hatred of ourselves someone else's job and just stop hating ourselves but much of the time he avoids them entirely as in having his grandpa grandson duo forget their dramatic and instructive episode long journey because their memories were erased all those memories just erased as a result rick's never forced to learn from his biggest failures there's a lesson here and i'm not the one that's gonna figure it out and when an occasional episode does offer a moral it'll often immediately be subverted as in the aforementioned vat of acid episode don't ever make fun of me again ever and on the truly rare occasion when harmon does offer a really salient lesson he does so only once it's too late to actually make a difference holy [ __ ] i'm a terrible father we also see this irreverent approach on community like when pierce fakes being on his deathbed to wreak havoc in the study group by giving them gifts specifically tailored to their weaknesses annie as the brains of the group believes she solved the riddle of pierce's lesson you're trying to show me the dangers of my own elitism my constant striving to be the best so i'm re-creating this tiara because if i become the kind of person who thinks it's their place to pick favorites and torture the rest i'll die sad and alone and that's what you were trying to teach me of course in reality he's actually just my favorite on a more traditional show peers would be trying to teach each character to grow not intentionally capitalizing on their daddy issues love jeffrey this is your father or triggering their fears of the host of reading rainbow levar burton hi i'm levar burton perhaps harmon's not only telling us that it's unlikely that characters will change within a single episode but that maybe most people don't change that often either and so harmon's stories don't seem to inspire change in the viewer or as abed puts it in communities finale tv defeats its own purpose when it's pushing an agenda or trying to defeat other tv or being proud or ashamed of itself for existing it's not just how harmon tells stories that plays with the rules of sitcoms it's also how he ends them traditionally a sitcom will end with the characters we love getting their dream jobs their romantic climax or both a show's series finale often acts as the final stage of a character arc where a character is finally rewarded for their change showing us that if we are good hard-working people things will eventually work out for us naturally season and especially series finales tend to be happy shit's creaks series finale is literally called happy ending and sees all of its characters find joy and all we can wish for our families for those we love is that that wind will eventually place us on solid ground and i believe it's done just that for my family here in this little town in the middle of nowhere communities finale was far less conventionally rewarding serving up a hearty dose of reality rather than a heartwarming fantasy the characters find contentment and even happiness in their lives without having any dramatic growth or shift in character though it's not necessarily anticlimactic there's no grand celebration or huge romantic come to jesus the others are coming i think you should kiss me goodbye or you might regret it for the rest of your life what about you i'll regret the kiss for a week i'm in my 20s who cares rather than eventually landing their dream careers jeff doesn't return to law and brita is still making moscow mules at happy hour even when characters do get their happy endings like annie and abed who move away to pursue their careers the show's finale focuses on the discomfort and uncertainty in each character's life as they move on characters aren't necessarily happy with the ending they're given you're gonna be fine you know i don't want to be fine i want to be 25 and heading out to the world the central message of communities finale is that nothing lasts forever it's tv it's comfort it's a friend you've known so well and for so long you just let it be with you and that nothing stays the same jeff i know it comforts you to look at things through that metal lens but this is reality tv's rules aren't based on common sense they're based on the studio wanting to milk their properties dry here here harmon's ending embraces this uncertainty not only of being in a series which goes from cancellation to renewal seemingly at random but maybe more significantly of life itself we see characters who are unsure of who they are and unsure of what the future holds his reluctance to give us a traditionally satisfying ending for these characters reflects that most people don't get their dream job or even really know what their dream job is and spend most of their life chasing mundane dreams and making mistakes well i want to live in the same home for more than a year order wine without feeling nervous have a resume full of crazy mistakes instead of crazy lies but the most important lesson for harmon might be that it's okay if we never have our tv endings as that's not how life works also we don't get to take commercial breaks and no phone numbers start with 555 so does dan harmon write the kind of characters that show us how to dream big love bigger and make all our dreams come true no no not at all you keep doing this time i don't know morty maybe i hate myself maybe i think i deserve to die but does he write the kind of characters that are relatable precisely because of their flaws their insecurities and their failures we think so and while rick and morty and community might not make you forget about reality the way a traditional sitcom might they'll at least remind you that reality isn't always so bad but what do you guys think is harman breaking the rules in subtle interesting ways is that what makes the show so compulsively watchable let us know in the comments big thanks to our patrons for keeping us on the air hit that subscribe button like your dan harmon smashing the rules of character development and don't forget to ring that bell and as always thanks for watching later [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Wisecrack

Views: 398,051

Keywords: dan harmon, rick and morty, justin roiland, community, donald glover, danny pudi, joel mchale, jeff winger, community bloopers, pickle rick, heros journey, harmon town, sitcoms, sitcom tropes, alison brie, chevy chase, gillian jacobs, yvette nicole brown, ken jeong, video essay, dan harmon interview, morty smith, beth smith, rick sanchez, dan harmon community, dan harmon story circle, dan harmon chevy chase, wisecrack, deep or dumb, what went wrong, philosophy

Id: VHNl8eV-NUM

Length: 18min 46sec (1126 seconds)

Published: Fri May 07 2021