'Community' Postmortem: Dan Harmon on 'Grifting 101'

Warning: This article contains storyline and character spoilers from this week’s episode of Community.

“Grifting 101″ is an ode to the classic film The Sting, or as Abed says in a later episode, “a post-modern homage mischaracterized by the ignorant as parody.” That’s a common knock on the show (by those who don’t watch the show), so we asked creator Dan Harmon what differentiates the two. We also discuss how the show is cast, and get a sneak peek at a future episode. (Somebody’s getting married!)

On a practical level, how do you keep your homages from devolving into parody?
I think it’s a matter of love, I guess? Homage is when you’re using classic examples of the kind of story you’re telling as a guideline, merging them all into a something that has the flavor of a genre, as opposed to making really specific references and recreating moments from things that people have to have seen in order to laugh, which is where I draw the line.

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First of all, I don’t think that comedically, that’s very sophisticated. Second of all, there’s a huge reality problem in a comedy where, all of a sudden, the characters happen to be saying the same lines from some movie. To keep from crossing over that line, there’s small things that we do.

Like when we did the Law & Order episode [Season 3′s “Basic Lupine Urology”]. For the episode, the characters were inexplicably dressed as if it was the late ‘90s, fall in New York. It had that very New York-y feel for an episode, and it didn’t make any sense that they were dressed that way. But at the same time, Law & Order isn’t about Air Force pilots, so they weren’t inexplicably dressed as Air Force pilots; it was just a slight tone to everything to make it feel more Law & Order-y.

It’s really a case-by-case basis. The big rule is, it has to make sense to anyone that’s joining you off the street, whether they’ve seen anything ever or not. And they have to believe that the characters are real.

Who is the actor playing Professor DeSalvo?
The guy playing the professor is Matt Berry, the creator of Toast of London, which is a really funny show. I’ve wanted to work with him; we’re big fans of his work since Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace and Snuff Box.

How do you go about casting? A few episodes from now, your wife [actress Erin McGathy] plays a major role; in the next episode, Upright Citizens Brigade co-founder Matt Besser and his wife play a married couple. Do you just reach out to people you already know and love, or is your casting director bringing these people in?
This season, we didn’t really have any time to make choices. The casting director was being handed scripts the day before they’re shot. So in the example of my wife playing [one of the character’s] fiancée, I think it was just a matter of me running into her office and saying, “We only have a day’s notice, but we need to find a really remarkable woman that could make it seem believable that she loves [the character], that she’s not being taken advantage of, that the love’s genuine, even though [the character’s] kind of a jerk. But we don’t want it to seem like a joke; it has to be really convincingly true love.” The casting director said, “How about your wife?” And I think her point was, she pretty convincingly married a piece of crap.

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The casting director will probably never talk to me again. It’s Juel Bestrop; she was the first casting director I ever worked with in 1999 with Heat Vision and Jack, and you can see in Season 5 how great it is. She came onboard in Season 3. Her discoveries, her real talent is for providing these random people. You can just ask her, “We just want somebody interesting,” and she’ll bring in five different kinds of interesting. This season, I think after a while, she was, like, “Well, the show doesn’t need a casting director because you’re never going to have the scripts more than a day ahead of time, so why don’t you just go ahead and cast all your friends?” So we did. [Laughs.]

Did it work out better? Were you more comfortable with it?
I’ve always been very comfortable working chaotically like that. The big difference is that, broadcast-level television, what it has to offer is a professional edge, which is the result of a 200-member crew all having a heads-up and being able to be geniuses in their own right. If you just have one guy going, “I’m a genius and the script’s not done yet,” everyone else has to wait for a script, and then they have an hour to throw together what they read. Then you might as well not be doing a broadcast-level show. You can do that with eight people. You can grab a boom mic and run out. I enjoy it, but it’s a waste. It’s a waste of a lot of geniuses that were there to help me.

Community is released every Tuesday on Yahoo Screen.