Comedian/podcast host/angry guy Marc Maron is guest hosting G4’s Attack of the Show this week, and last night he scored a major coup: the first post-being-fired-from-Community interview with Dan Harmon, whose name will forever be associated with the sentence “he didn’t know how to play the game,” non-Omar division.
The choice block quotes include, via Pop Culture Brain:
“If 20 people call you a horse’s ass, you buy a saddle. I feel like I’m a good person and a professional, a very able leader of men. I also feel like I’m 25…Maybe I am just a jerk. To people who work above me I am a liability that isn’t worth the benefit. It’s a low-rated show that’s not generating much revenue.”
At least he’s honest with himself?
“My [next] idea is to have less ideas, because I want to be successful in television. I turned off 90 percent of my brain … for the first season of Community.” That next show, Harmon says, could be a multi-camera comedy — like The Big Bang Theory — “just to prove that it’s not cancer, it doesn’t have to be. TV in all of its ugliness can be a beautiful thing.”
I found the outpouring of grief that Harmon received after being booted from Community very uncalled for — yes, it sucked that it had to come to that, but again, he didn’t know how to play the game. To us, he’s a brilliant creator of a brilliant show, but from NBC’s perspective, he’s someone who constantly went overbudget and took his grievances (mostly with Chevy Chase) public on a series that brings in little revenue and even less of a Nielsen audience. I get their line of reasoning for what they did. But goddamn do I love that final quote. If Harmon can create a commercially and critically successful multi-camera sitcom, that would be even more impressive than airing an entire episode that parodies My Dinner with Andre…in 2011…in Friends‘ former timeslot.
