Dan Harmon

Channel 101 explains most of what followed. The alternative television network and website he co-founded with Rob Schrab was built around short pilots screened to a live audience that decided which ones came back, which is a competitive, formal way to think about comedy. Harmon has approached everything since as a structural problem.

Community, which ran from 2009 to 2015, is the result. Its best episodes are exercises: take a genre, run the same cast through it with total commitment, and let the actual emotional story ride underneath the pastiche. The show is often accused of being clever at the expense of feeling, which has it backwards. The cleverness is the delivery system.

Rick and Morty, co-created with Justin Roiland and running since 2013, took the same method into animation and a far larger audience. Our records also credit him with an Emmy for outstanding original music and lyrics, which is an unusual trophy for a sitcom writer to own.

The rest is an ecosystem that mostly points at itself: the Harmontown podcast from 2012 to 2019 and the documentary made about it, HarmonQuest, in which he plays a character called Fondue Zoobag, plus creator credits on The Sarah Silverman Program, Strange Planet and Krapopolis. He is one of very few television writers whose working process has become as public as the shows themselves, and that is either the appeal or the problem, depending entirely on how you feel about him.