Dan Harmon, the story-structure obsessive who keeps breaking his own circle

Dan Harmon

Photo: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 3, 1973 Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States
Occupation	Television Writer, Showrunner and Producer
Known for	Funny People, Knight of Cups, Back in Time
Awards	2 Emmy · Academy Award

Dan Harmon has a diagram for stories, and he says he cannot stop seeing it. Eight points on a circle: a character is comfortable, wants something, crosses into unfamiliar territory, adapts, gets what they wanted, pays a heavy price for it, goes home and comes back changed. The odd thing is how little the life of its author resembles a clean loop. Harmon was thrown off the sitcom he invented, rebuilt his name on a cartoon about a nihilist scientist, and still owes his most loyal audience the film his own characters promised them on air.

The Milwaukee years explain a lot. Harmon was born and raised in the city, finished high school in suburban Brown Deer and spent time at Marquette University. What he did find was the stage: he performed improv with ComedySportz in Milwaukee alongside Rob Schrab, the cartoonist who would become his first long-term creative partner, and he co-wrote issues of Schrab’s cult comic Scud: The Disposable Assassin.

The partnership moved to Los Angeles and produced a calling card almost nobody saw. Heat Vision and Jack, a 1999 Fox pilot directed by Ben Stiller with Jack Black as a super-intelligent astronaut and Owen Wilson as a talking motorcycle, was never picked up and became a bootleg legend instead. Harmon and Schrab answered the rejection by building their own pipeline: Channel 101, a monthly short-film festival where a live audience decides which pilots get another episode. It was there, coaching amateur directors who insisted they could not plot an episode, that Harmon distilled Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey into the eight-step story circle.

The circle paid off quickly. Harmon and Schrab shared screenplay credit with Pamela Pettler on Monster House, the 2006 animated haunted-house film directed by Gil Kenan that earned an Oscar nomination for best animated feature. A year later he co-created The Sarah Silverman Program for Comedy Central, and in 2009 he shared an Emmy for the music and lyrics of Hugh Jackman‘s opening number at the Academy Awards.

The real turn came from a brief return to school. Harmon’s stint at Glendale Community College in California became the seed of Community, which NBC launched in 2009: a campus sitcom that kept turning into something else, a paintball action film one week, a stop-motion Christmas special the next, a branching-timeline experiment in the episode “Remedial Chaos Theory”, which earned Harmon and Chris McKenna a Hugo nomination. Writing Abed, the film-obsessed student who narrates life as genre, led Harmon to research traits he recognized in himself; a doctor agreed he might be on the autism spectrum, and he said publicly that he had more in common with Abed than with the show’s leading man.

The ratings never matched the devotion. In 2012, after open friction with Sony, Harmon was removed as showrunner. The fourth season went ahead without him, and he was brought back in 2013 as co-showrunner with McKenna. NBC cancelled the show in 2014, Yahoo Screen rescued it for a sixth season in 2015, and fans have repeated Abed’s prophecy, “six seasons and a movie”, ever since.

The firing changed the rest of his career. Harmontown, a live comedy show and podcast he had started with Jeff B. Davis at a Hollywood comic shop, went weekly and became a place where Harmon confessed, ranted and played Dungeons and Dragons with game master Spencer Crittenden in front of paying crowds; it ran until 2019 and spawned the animated role-playing series HarmonQuest. In parallel he developed a cartoon with Justin Roiland, whose crude Channel 101 parody of Back to the Future had stuck with him. Rick and Morty premiered on Adult Swim in December 2013, won the Emmy for outstanding animated program in 2018 and 2020, and in 2018 secured a 70-episode order. Harmon also voices Birdperson, the show’s mournful avian warrior.

The flattering version of this story, the misunderstood genius vindicated, leaves out what Harmon himself put on the record. In January 2018 he admitted that he had mistreated Megan Ganz, a writer on Community, after she rejected his advances, and he spent a long stretch of a Harmontown episode detailing what he had done. Ganz, who had first said she was not ready to forgive him, later called it a masterclass in how to apologize. Months later a 2009 parody video he had made resurfaced and he apologized again. Then, in January 2023, Adult Swim cut ties with Roiland after domestic violence charges, which were later dropped, leaving Harmon as the only remaining creator of the network’s biggest show. The structuralist who preaches that characters must pay a price for what they want has been unusually public about the bills in his own life; whether that candor redeems the conduct is a judgment his audience has never settled.

He has spent the years since proving the operation can outlast any one person. Krapopolis, his Fox comedy about a dysfunctional family of humans, gods and monsters trying to run one of the first cities of a mythical ancient Greece, premiered in 2023 and has been renewed through a fifth season. Strange Planet, co-created with the cartoonist Nathan W. Pyle, arrived on Apple TV+ the same year. In 2026 the ninth season of Rick and Morty aired from May to July, Adult Swim launched President Curtis, a spin-off he co-created with James Siciliano in which Keith David reprises the series’ bombastic commander-in-chief, and a second season of that show went into production. In May he confirmed that a Rick and Morty feature film is in development at Warner Bros., with longtime supervising director Jacob Hair attached, describing it as a 90-minute version of the show with a bigger budget behind it.

Harmon, born on January 3, 1973, has lived a private life almost as public as his work. He married the comedian Erin McGathy in 2014, and they announced their divorce the following year. The writer Cody Heller, with whom he began a relationship in 2016, later turned one of their stranger domestic episodes into the Quibi comedy Dummy, with Anna Kendrick playing her and Donal Logue playing a version of him.

The calendar ahead is crowded. Harmon and showrunner Scott Marder say the tenth season of Rick and Morty is on track for summer 2027, and the Community film for Peacock, which he wrote with Andrew Guest and which Donald Glover and Alison Brie have said is fully scripted, is still waiting for a cast whose schedules line up. By the rules of his own circle, the character only gets home once he has paid. Greendale is still holding the door.

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Tags: showrunners, Dan Harmon, Rick and Morty, Community, Justin Roiland, Monster House

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