'Community' Postmortem: Dan Harmon on Paintball and the Origins of the Dean

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

Once again, Community has delivered another “flawless postmodern homage to action adventure mythology mischaracterized by the ignorant as parody” aka the annual paintball episode. For a show that’s so anxious to remake the landscape of TV and quests ceaselessly to be original, it seems odd that showrunner Dan Harmon would want to do anything more than once. We asked him about that impulse, and where the Dean lands on the spectrum of classic TV bosses.

Everybody loves the paintball episodes and they’re the first thing many people think of when they think of the show. Are you sick of doing them, or do you like the challenge of keeping the idea fresh?
The latter. “You can’t make a fifth Fast and the Furious movie — you’ve already made four of them!” Well, why can’t you? What could we do in this one that would make people start talking about this franchise? I do like the challenge of doing what you don’t have to do.

And then also, when you’re running behind schedule, you need to be telling people two weeks in advance about an episode you haven’t written yet, it’s a lot easier to say to the prop master, “Go get the paintball guns,” even though you haven’t written a word of the script [laughs], than to sit there and try to figure out, “Uh… it’s going to be about forgiveness? So we’ll need tablecloths? I don’t know.”

The Dean finally expresses out loud that he feels threatened by Frankie — which seems like something he’s been wanting to say all season. Are there other character arcs you made a conscious effort to explore this season?
As much as I like a lot of Season 3’s episodes, the things I didn’t like about Season 3 are the things that were planned in advance. Because that was the season where NBC demanded that we pitch the entire season to them before they decided if there would be a Season 3, so we had to come up with all these arcs.

I get better results — slightly better results — by not planning stuff. So we talk about what Jeff would be going through at this stage; we talk about those concepts at the beginning of the season. What we don’t do is say, “OK, by Episode 3, he’s going to go from being this to that.” We just keep those characters in that area.

So, for instance, we’re seeing Jeff struggling with the idea that — whereas he began this series as the character that thought he was too cool for school — he is now, most certainly, the least cool among them and is doomed to stay there forever because he has no other options. Everyone else is relatively younger and has relatively more options. His worst nightmare has become a reality, in a sense. So we’ve been watching Jeff struggle with that. We don’t know what the resolution to that is at the beginning of the season; we just decide that that’s going to be the theme of his emotional state for the season.

What terms would use to define the Dean?
The Dean was always a very televisual archetype. I knew that, to generate story, we needed a leader — a boss figure — who could go back and forth between being the evil tyrant that causes things to happen by some decree and being the damsel-in-distress who’s screwed things up so much that he needs help.

There’s only a handful of boss archetypes that have successfully walked that tightrope in my memory. One of them is Louis De Palma from Taxi and another one is Gordon Jump’s character in WKRP. I wanted to fuse those two characters. Gordon Jump’s character [Arthur Carlson], he was a mama’s boy who had been put in charge of the radio station by his rich mother and was always screwing things up. He often needed help, but then also, he often was the reason why there was a crisis, because of some decision he had made. And, of course, Louis De Palma was a selfish, corrupt figure that was very grouchy and kept people at arms length and abused their labor. But then, at the same time of course, underneath that exterior, he was a very lonely man who needed a lot of help himself.

I recognized that those characters are so important to story — it wasn’t really about the group needs this or the group needs that. It was more about Gilligan [needing] an island.

Community is released every Tuesday on Yahoo Screen.