This Is How Dan Harmon Determined If a ‘Community’ Storyline Was Too Crazy

One of the very best Halloween episodes ever made is Community’s “Epidemiology.” The Season Two outing found the Greendale gang transforming into a horde of zombies after Dean Pelton mistakenly served them tacos full of classified government mystery meat. 

The concept of introducing the horror of zombies (not to mention the horror of ABBA) was pretty out there for the show, especially so early in its run. Luckily, creator Dan Harmon had a trick for how to measure the realism of the Community-verse. Back in 2011, Harmon told The A.V. Club that the Halloween episode was “further than we’d ever gone.” And he determined this by imagining how prominently each Community episode would be reported in the news. “The litmus test I used to prove that was to run through every episode in both seasons and picture myself reading the events that take place in the story in the local paper,” Harmon explained.

For example, the events of “Contemporary American Poultry” wouldn’t be that newsworthy. “There was a shortage of chicken fingers on campus, and some kid took over the supply and was selling chicken fingers for favors. Whatever!” Harmon reasoned. “Why did this make the paper? It was on page eight.”

The same went for “Modern Warfare,” Community’s first paintball episode. “There was a paintball game that got out of hand. Somebody built a fire in the cafeteria to warm their hands because the power went out. A guy set off a dye pack, and there were Die Hard themes. Again, it sounds interesting, but if I’m more than a city away, it’s not even in the paper.”

But the events of “Epidemiology” clearly broke that rule, Harmond admitted. “The military is covering up an experimental bio-weapon in the form of a rabies virus that spreads through bites and turns people into zombies and it was accidentally served at a Halloween party. Yeah. It’s on the cover of Time. No matter where it happened. It could have happened at the North Pole, and you’d be reading about it.”

But Harmon went ahead and decided to do a zombie episode anyway — not because it made sense for the show, necessarily, but because he thought that he would be fired at any moment and didn’t want to regret not going for it. “I will drive past this campus every day for the rest of my life and get a sour stomach if I don’t do a zombie episode for Halloween,” Harmon declared. “If you told me I had a six-year order of episodes, I could probably see my way to not pollute my show with such fantasy. But it had to be done.”

His concern wasn’t that the story itself was unbelievable, because “a sitcom is a fucking constant violation of all reality,” what with all the missing walls and constant disembodied laughter. Harmon was more worried about  “protecting the characters’ minds within the canon,” which explains why he decided to just give everybody amnesia in the end.

It’s a good lesson for young writers out there: When in doubt, just give your characters some sort of debilitating memory loss.

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