"He refused to do the “tag” for the Digital Estate Planning episode (the 8 bit video game episode). In the scripted tag, Abed comes to Pierce with the thumb drive he took, and says “Pierce, I’ve been able to adjust some of the code for your Dad’s video game and I’ve made a version I think you might like better.” He puts the thumb drive into a laptop in front of Pierce. We cut to the laptop screen, where we see Pierce’s avatar on a front lawn with the giant floating head of Cornelius. Every time Pierce presses the space bar, his avatar throws a baseball to his father’s head, which gives him a thousand points and a “great job, son!” Pierce presses the space bar a few times, pauses, then leans over and embraces Abed and we fade to black. When Adam Countee pitched that tag, tears instantly rolled down my cheeks, and in point of fact, my eyes are getting watery describing it to you. It was the most important part of the episode and possibly one of the most important moments of the season. I was very upset to hear that it wasn’t shot because someone didn’t feel like shooting it, especially since it was literally the last day of shooting, which meant we’d never be able to pick it up. I regret nothing about how upset I got. My job was to care about my show."
"I mean, so, if you’re a shipper…nobody knows your value more than me. Nobody wants to not piss you off more than me. But nobody wants… You don’t want me doing everything that you want, because that’s not what romance is. Romance has weather and traffic lights and banana peels involved. It has unpredictability involved."
- Dan Harmon, on the commentary for Community s02e20, “Paradigms of Human Memory” (via c-peterson)
"[…] I always felt that the triumph of Britta as a character was that she was the only ”real” person, stuck on Gilligan’s island, and ironically being punished by it. Sometimes we would cross the line. I did find myself telling the writer’s room here and there, ”let’s not make her a dumb blonde, she’s a high school dropout and she’s computer illiterate and she’s a late bloomer because she’s lived a fuller live, but there’s a difference between that and an airhead.” If we made her an airhead, it was an accident, or an isolated instance of us being too tempted by a funny joke. Troy was an airhead. Britta was a work of art. She was a post post feminist masterpiece and a televised work of art. If I do say so myself."
"We sacrifice ourselves for each other. And that guilt that we feel when we let somebody down or when they’re afraid of us when they think they’re gonna kill us is a sort of excommunication phobia where we’re not being good monkeys, we’re not doing this right, this person’s afraid of me, I hurt somebody. I’m not long for this world if I gotta function on my own. I will not survive out there."
"There’s still not enough understanding between me and other people. I don’t know if there ever will be, so the more I can get, the better. I’m bad on the phone; I’m bad at therapy; I’m bad at one-on-one; I’m bad at playing board games; I’m bad at hanging out. But I’m OK at talking to people in a big group. The permission to keep rambling without having to apologize. When I put the thoughts that rattle around in my brain into a microphone and hear a bunch of other people hear them and either not react to them or laugh at them, something happens to me that makes me feel like I might live another day without an ulcer or a tumor or something. Like, I feel like I’m getting something done emotionally."
"When I pitched the show, I was pitching a very meta story about an asshole that learned to love strangers. I knew it was meta already at the time, but I had no idea how meta it was going to get, because I had no idea that this was going to happen. I was pitching the story of a guy who, like me, had gone to community college and had at one point been invited to be part of a study group, but didn’t want to be part of a study group, because he had nothing to gain from it and everything to lose from it. At some time in that study group, during an all-night study session in that little tiny room at Glendale Community College, I all of a sudden started giving a crap about people that I had nothing to gain from in any realness, other than a human one. I thought scenically in my head at that point, ‘This is the kind of stuff that people eat up, right? This is what they’re always trying to give you on TV to keep you tuned in between Snickers commercials.’ Because people like people, and people that want to write television — people that want to direct it, people that want to edit it, people that want to be creative — we love people, but we’re so often dedicated to our love of people that we’re not actually part of people. I was one of those people, and I probably still am, but at that point I realized, ‘Wow, this is a weird story.’ This guy is not a part of people, but he’s going to become a part of people against his will."
"I think the most important thing you can know is that you want to be a part of all the other individuals. You don’t want to be alone. There’s a personality disorder for every single thing you can name under the sun. There are people who put entire jars of peanut butter up their butt. There are people who are sexually attracted to cats. But there is no one who wants to be alone."
"For two seasons we wanted to do an episode where Jeff Winger pretended there was a class called ‘Nicolas Cage Appreciation,’ and then the Dean caught them and as punishment to them he was going to make that a real class and force them to watch all the Nicolas Cage movies in one night. The thing about Nicolas Cage movies is… unless you’re a total cynical dick, you have to embrace the fact that Nicolas Cage is a pretty good actor. He’s done a lot of weird, dumb movies, but that was supposed to be the point of the episode — that Nicolas Cage is a metaphor for God, or for society, or for the self, or something. It’s like — what is Nicolas Cage? What is he? Is he an idiot? Or a genius? Can you write him off, or is he inexplicably bound to your soul?"
