As a TV writer and producer rather than an actor or performer Dan Harmon belongs to a tribe of showbiz professionals who aren’t generally accorded wider fame and renown. The fact that Harmon — whose cross-country odyssey amid a spate of personal and professional troubles is the subject of the frank and often very funny documentary Harmontown by Neil Berkeley — has been so fortunate can be attributed to three trends.
One is the rising prominence of the TV showrunner a powerful position that used to mean diddly-squat to viewers but in our age of ask-me-anything Reddit interviews and online episode recaps can now turn a hit show’s prime mover into a bigger celeb than the cast members. Harmon’s claim to fame is Community the whip-smart genre-bending sitcom about community-college students that somehow survived five seasons on NBC despite low ratings and network indifference. (Fans were ecstatic at the news that Yahoo!’s new network is set to fulfil the first half of the hashtag rallying cry of #sixseasonsandamovie.)
Berkeley’s film catches Harmon at a particularly troubled juncture having been fired by NBC at the end of the third season due to conflicts with his bosses and an ugly public feud with Community cast member Chevy Chase. Luckily for Harmon he benefits from another trend: the booming popularity of comedy podcasts. Whether their makers use them as opportunities to riff with buddies rave or rant about pet interests or peeves workshop embryonic bits or maintain a link with fans podcasts encourage listeners to feel like they’re part of a comedic inner sanctum. In so doing they’ve brought much-deserved attention to mavericks like Paul F. Tompkins and Marc Maron. Harmontown a podcast that Harmon started with a few friends at the back of an L.A. comic store in the summer of 2012 soon attracted over 100000 listeners a week enough of a following that it seemed like a perfectly fine idea to take the show to stages across America last year. Excerpts of these shows provide the movie with its liveliest moments along with guest spots by John Hodgman and Jason Sudeikis.
As for the last of the three trends that have made an unlikely hero out of Harmon — a man whose default mode is boozy wreck — it might best be described as nerd empowerment. No longer stuck at the fringes of popular culture the armies of comic-book fans zombie obsessives core gamers and Comic-Con pilgrims now dominate wide swaths of the mainstream. While Harmon’s rocky trajectory is ostensibly the subject of Berkeley’s film its real purpose is to celebrate a wider triumph for emboldened geeks like Spencer Crittenden. The dungeon master for the onstage games of D&D that are part of every Harmontown episode Crittenden is the traveller who undergoes the most dramatic transformation during the course of the tour.
And since Harmon remains a prickly presence throughout Crittenden also serves as the underdog hero the movie needs. Though it could’ve easily had the reek of a vanity project Harmontown is both a timely study of vital matters of comedy and celebrity and a celebration of the communities we forge with like-minds wherever they happen to be.
HARMONTOWN directed by Neil Berkeley plays Saturday October 18 at the Globe Cinema.
