Dan Harmon Popular Books

Dan Harmon Biography & Facts

Daniel James "Dan" Harmon (born January 3, 1973) is an American screenwriter and producer. He is best known as the creator and producer of the NBC and Yahoo! Screen sitcom Community (2009–2015), creator and host of the comedy podcast Harmontown (2012–2019), co-creator of the Adult Swim animated sitcom Rick and Morty (2013–present) and its subsequent franchise along with Justin Roiland, and co-founder of the alternative television network and website Channel 101 along with Rob Schrab. Early life Daniel James Harmon was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on January 3, 1973. He graduated from Brown Deer High School in Brown Deer, Wisconsin, and attended Marquette University. He briefly attended Glendale Community College in Glendale, California, an experience which would later form the basis of his sitcom Community. Career Early career (1996–2008) Harmon was a member of ComedySportz in Milwaukee, alongside Rob Schrab, a member of the sketch troupe The Dead Alewives. They produced an album, Take Down the Grand Master, in 1996. Harmon frequently appeared at Milwaukee's Safehouse free comedy stage early in his career. A notable routine was a song about masturbation. Harmon co-created the television pilot Heat Vision and Jack (starring Owen Wilson and Jack Black) and several Channel 101 shows, some featuring Black, Drew Carey, and Sarah Silverman. He co-created Comedy Central's The Sarah Silverman Program and served as head writer for several episodes. Harmon portrayed a highly fictionalized version of Ted Templeman on two episodes of the Channel 101 web series Yacht Rock, a satirical history of soft rock, featuring stories about Templeman's collaborations with The Doobie Brothers, Michael McDonald and Van Halen. He was the creator, executive producer, and a featured performer in Acceptable.TV, a Channel 101-based sketch show airing for eight episodes in March 2007 on VH1. He and Rob Schrab co-wrote the screenplay for the Academy Award-nominated film Monster House. He is credited with writing part of Rob Schrab's comic book series Scud: The Disposable Assassin, as well as the spin-off comic series La Cosa Nostroid. Community (2009–2012; 2014–2015) In 2009, Harmon's sitcom Community, inspired by his own community college experiences, was picked up by NBC to be in its fall lineup. Harmon served as executive producer and showrunner for 3 seasons until May 18, 2012, when it was announced that Harmon was being terminated from his position on Community as a result of creative conflicts between himself and Sony executives. On June 1, 2013, Harmon announced that he would be returning to Community, serving as co-showrunner along with Chris McKenna; this was confirmed by Sony Pictures on June 10. NBC cancelled the show after its fifth season in May 2014, after which Harmon announced on June 30, 2014, that Yahoo! had renewed the series for a 13-episode sixth season to air online on Yahoo! Screen. Harmontown and Harmonquest (2011–2019) On May 23, 2011, Harmon began hosting a monthly live comedy show and podcast at Meltdown Comics in Hollywood called Harmontown. After his firing from Community, the show became weekly. The show is co-hosted by Jeff B. Davis. Harmontown has included a regular segment where the hosts played an ongoing campaign of pen-and-paper role-playing games, first Dungeons & Dragons, and later Shadowrun, with the help of show Game Master Spencer Crittenden. The segment inspired the Seeso original animated series HarmonQuest. The show has included multiple celebrity guests. Harmon and Davis took the show on tour in early 2013, which was the subject of a documentary. The Doccumentary, also called Harmontown, was produced by director Neil Berkeley that follows Harmon, Davis, McGathy, and Crittenden. It premiered at the Austin Film Festival SXSW on March 8, 2014. On September 10, 2019, the Harmontown Twitter account announced that the podcast would be coming to an end, and its final episode was published on December 5, 2019. Starburns Industries (2010–2020) During the first season of Community, Harmon also co-founded Starburns Industries with several people including Dino Stamatopoulos, who played a character called Star-Burns on Community. In its first year, the company produced a stop-motion episode of Community which garnered the company an Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Animation. Starburns Industries was then involved in the creation of Rick and Morty and animated films Anomalisa and Bubbles. It has also produced season 2 of Mary Shelley's Frankenhole and the special Beforel Orel for Adult Swim, HarmonQuest for Seeso and VRV and Animals for HBO. In 2013, Harmon published the book You'll Be Perfect When You're Dead. Harmon left the company in 2020. The studio's output declined steadily after the departure, with their only released projects after 2020 being The Freak Brothers and Slippin' Jimmy. Rick and Morty (2013–present) Harmon and co-showrunner Justin Roiland began developing ideas for an animated show during Harmon's yearlong break from Community. For its fall 2012 season, Adult Swim ordered a 30-minute animated pilot from Harmon and Roiland. The pilot, Rick and Morty, is about the adventures of a brilliant but mean-spirited inventor and his less-than-genius grandson. The show premiered on December 2, 2013, and was renewed for second and third seasons. The series' fourth season concluded in May 2020. Harmon voiced the recurring character of Bird Person. In May 2018, Rick and Morty was renewed for a further 70 episodes after Harmon and Roiland came to an agreement with Adult Swim. In January 2023, Harmon became the sole showrunner after Roiland was dismissed from the series amidst domestic assault charges. The Sirens of Titan and Krapopolis It was announced through the online site The A.V. Club in July 2017 that Harmon and Evan Katz would adapt Kurt Vonnegut's 1959 novel The Sirens of Titan into a television series. As of October 2021, no more details have been released. In June 2020, it was announced that Fox has greenlit an animated comedy series from Harmon. The series will be set in Ancient Greece and is a co-production between Fox Entertainment and Bento Box Entertainment. On May 17, 2021, it was announced that the series would be titled Krapopolis. The series will be the first fully-owned new-Fox series. Writing style "Story circle" technique Harmon adapted the hero's journey, a well-known storytelling framework, for use in television; he calls this technique the "story circle". He began developing the technique while stuck on a screenplay in the late 1990s, and wanted to codify the storytelling process to unveil the "structure" that powers movies and TV shows. He said, "I was thinking, there must be some symmetry to this. Some simplicity." While working on Channel 101, he found that many of the directors he was working with claimed that they were unable to write plots for television shows. This prompted him to simplify Joseph Camp.... Discover the Dan Harmon popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Dan Harmon books.