How NBC tried to kill Community's D&D Episode

[Krug]

Dan Harmon walks us through Community?s second season (part 3 of 4) | TV | Interview | The A.V. Club

From producer Dan Harmon about the just concluded season of Community

“Advanced Dungeons & Dragons” (Feb. 3, 2011)
The group gets together to play a game of Dungeons & Dragons to help depressed fellow student Fat Neil.

DH: I played D&D when I was a kid, and I’m more familiar with it than most people are with poker. So it’s the same reason that people on other shows are pitching, “Let’s do a whole episode where it’s just Paul Reiser and Norm Macdonald watching a Lakers game.” Or these guys are fixing a car in their driveway, and the whole episode is they’re fixing their car. Whatever you have a relationship with, you realize the potential for it story-wise. For me, it’s Dungeons & Dragons. The closest analogy is poker. What I kept saying is that when they’re playing poker in The Odd Couple, I don’t know anything about poker. It’s not what’s important. And arguably, I think Dungeons & Dragons is a more accessible game than poker, because there are all these weird arbitrary rules about what beats a straight flush, but there are no arbitrary rules about if you take someone’s sword and rape their family. That’s worse than if you don’t.

So I always wanted to do a Dungeons & Dragons episode. I knew that we had predecessors there. I knew that The IT Crowd did one. I knew that Freaks And Geeks did one. I saw that what all those had in common was, number one, they bounced back and forth from the actual game to other stories, and also that the joke, the conceit was that it’s a nerdy game, and that’s the whole point. I wanted to just fade into the group playing the game, and how do you tell a story that way? That was another case of the writers blowing my socks off, because I gave them a Rubik’s cube of a quandary. I said, “Make a game of Dungeons & Dragons.” And none of these other people even played the ing game. I came to the lot with this milk crate of books from when I was 15. I plopped them down on the table and I said, “You don’t have to start reading this stuff, but flip through the pages and see if you figure out a way that there could be stakes in Dungeons & Dragons, the way that Jeff and Britta ed in [‘Modern Warfare’].” And they ing nailed it.

It was all while I was out of the room, somebody coming up with these Fat Neil concepts they equated with Saving Private Ryan. The idea of this stranger you didn’t know being the point of this whole thing, and somehow that being even more important. I remember Megan [Ganz] coming to the fore in the third act, and really being invested in these concepts of “How do we break this third act? What is it that happens? How do you beat Evil Pierce, who has the power of a dragon?” And coming up with concepts ranging from, “Well, he seals them in a cube that they can’t get out of, so in the game, they start creating a game called Dungeons & Dragons where they start playing their own game sealed in the cube, and he’s not allowed in it in the confines of his own game unless he unseals the cube.” That got simplified to “I use my turn to feel sorry for you.” [Laughs.] That was great.

Chris McKenna and Andrew Guest and I spent two days in a row on that script, first at my place, and then we moved over to Andrew’s place. It was a 48-hour, three-man working of that script, finding the final points of the story and stuff. It was in those final hours that I came up with the idea that Pierce could cheat by getting hold of the actual adventure that they were playing and stuff like that.

You’ve got Christmas, and you’ve got Dungeons & Dragons as the major political plot points in the making of Community’s second season. I was asked not to write the episode, they said “Because it won’t be an accessible topic.” I said, “I appreciate your concern, I’ll make it accessible.” This was the studio, not the network. We spent two days writing it, and we finished it, and we read it through, these two gentlemen and I at Andrew Guest’s house. His girlfriend made us Pop-Tarts and we had a little shot of cognac or something. We’d been up all night. We almost cried because we were like, “God, that was ing hard.” And it was so satisfying. “What a nice little story this is. Let’s get to that table-read.” And we did it. We threaded the needle. We made Dungeons & Dragons accessible. We went and table-read it, and it was a great table-read, people loved it. The director, Joe Russo, was like, “I can’t wait to shoot it. I don’t have any thoughts about how to improve it. I think it’s great.”

The studio and network response at the table-read was so removed from that. They were so upset about the crime of this episode having been written. The note session as a whole was preceded by a 45-minute period of them walking around the lot whispering to each other. They told me they would come up to my office and meet me privately. When they came up, I had the director and all of the writers in the office with me, because I was terrified. They sat down, and they said, “Look, where do we start?” I couldn’t believe this was happening. I was like, “This is opposite of how you should feel right now. This is a great episode. We’re going to get a 1.7 no matter what. We will build our ratings in other ways. The episode is not about credit cards; it’s not about Hilary Duff. It’s going to get the same numbers. There is a cultural build to a hit show. We have to prove to people that we’re capable of good things so they can trust us, so that we can have a relationship. One day we will either be a highly rated show or we’ll be cancelled. It will not have to do with this moment. This episode is good, the story is good, these characters are good. Anyone who doesn’t tune in because the commercial says they’re playing Dungeons & Dragons, it’s not my fault. It’s not on me.”

It was such a depressing note session, because they didn’t even have any notes on the story. They just didn’t want it to exist. I took a photograph of my eyes driving home that day at 3 p.m. because I was leaving work early. I looked in my rearview mirror, and I was crying. More than crying, I was red-eyes, tears streaming, weeping. And I was weeping out of self-pity and frustration, like a child weeps when he doesn’t understand his parents’ rules. “Why can’t I have ice cream when I ate my liver?” I took a photo of it, so I could show it to them between seasons, because as I told my girlfriend when I got home, “I think I’m going to have to quit my own show, because I can’t operate under these circumstances. I can’t be this proud of something that the people paying me to do it are this ashamed of. It will never work. We’ll never achieve anything. It’ll never connect.” So it was the best of times and the worst of times. I think that episode is fantastic. I haven’t watched it again, but I remember it as being something else. I invite people over to my house to watch the episodes with me on Thursday night that I’m really proud of, and that was definitely one of them.

 

[ggroy]

No big surprise here.

I'm not surprised at all anymore, about stuff like this happening.

 

[Fast Learner]

They really did make D&D accessible, largely by focusing on what many of us enjoy most about the game: the story. Expand out from that just enough to show how the real humans playing the game are caught up in the story and poof, roleplaying games in a nutshell.

It really was a thing of beauty, and while it's not surprising that the studio and the network reacted that way, it's still disappointing because my hopes have been raised by the extremely high-quality, well-received television that has come into the world over the last decade.

Alas.

 

[GreyLord]

Nice read. Glad that the episode did air. Great episode.

 

[Wycen]

I didn't see the episode so maybe this explains things, but paragraph 3 makes no sense to me.

 

[Fast Learner]

Yup, seeing the episode would explain it.

 

[DumbPaladin]

I didn't see the episode so maybe this explains things, but paragraph 3 makes no sense to me.

It's the part of the quoted text that most relies on understanding the episode. The line is a direct quote from the episode, and happens right at the climax and is, in essence, part of how Act 3 finishes.

I've never seen an episode of Community except this one, but it was really well done, and so obviously written by people who enjoy D&D greatly. It was like a little love letter ... but still focused on being a comedy show.

 

[LightPhoenix]

I'd strongly suggest that people read the entire interview (all four parts). Not only is it a fascinating look behind the scenes, but it casts a lot more light on the issue.

Summing it up though, it sounds as if there was a lot of pushing by the studio and network that Harmon was fighting back against. It wasn't just the D&D episode, though it was notable. You really get the sense that somewhere that relationship between studio and show was strained. Harmon goes out of his way to differentiate between the studio and the network, by the way. By the end of the season he's been in several fights over episodes and comes pretty close to having a nervous breakdown, IMO. That the show is still so amazing despite that is frankly a testament to the skill of Harmon and his staff.

 

[JohnRTroy]

I find it still annoying and perplexing that, while D&D has had such an impact on pop culture by creating the RPG and many of its tropes, it is still treated as a stigma, even though people don't complain as much about computer games.

 

[Jared Rascher]

I find it still annoying and perplexing that, while D&D has had such an impact on pop culture by creating the RPG and many of its tropes, it is still treated as a stigma, even though people don't complain as much about computer games.

I don't think its that D&D has a stigma to Hollywood types. I really don't. At least not the one we are used to thinking about. I think there are a lot of Hollywood types that were "cool kids" in school, and the "stigma" that D&D has is that the annoying nerds that they couldn't stand played the game.

If D&D is used as a punchline for how pathetic a character is, they "get" the joke. If its used in any light that isn't about how nerdy and pathetic the people playing the game are, they don't "get" why you would use the game at all.

It reminds me of a Saturday Night Live skit from a decade or so back, where the whole punchline of how pathetic this guy that everyone thought was cool involved his friends finding out that he played D&D. No explanation needed, that proves he's worthless and worthy of ridicule.

Heck, even look at Brenden Fraser's character in Airheads. He can't be a cool rock star because he played D&D in high school. Him playing D&D is never defended, its something to be overcome by how "hardcore" he is now. And yet Adam Sandler's character playing with electric water guns is just funny.