“With Harmon and Community, it’s less about the cadence of the dialogue than it is about the style and ambition of the series. Community is the only sitcom I’m aware of where every episode’s story was modeled on Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero’s Journey,” and the show under Harmon was capable of morphing into a spaghetti Western, a zombie movie, a stop-motion animated Christmas special or whatever other genre Harmon felt like tackling that week. The homages and other high-concept episodes were always lovingly rendered, and the best of them also managed to combine with parody with genuine stories about the show’s characters and the problems they were dealing with. The show isn’t exactly auto-biographical, but its sensibilities are very much filtered through all the pop culture Harmon has consumed in his life, and Harmon has said that researching Asperger’s syndrome to help him better understand Abed made him realize that he had Asperger’s as well. Community is Dan Harmon; Dan Harmon is Community.”
