PHOTOGRAPHED BY LENNE CHAI

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Dan Harmon Is Ready to Talk

About All of It (Including the
Justin Roiland Drama)
The creative force behind 'Rick and Morty,'
'Community' and 'Krapopolis' was a say-
anything provocateur until a changing
culture, a few brushes with cancellation
and lots of therapy scared him into silence.
But boy does he miss his soapbox.

BY LACEY ROSE SEPTEMBER 27, 2023

T
here was a time, not too long ago,
when Dan Harmon shared
absolutely everything.

His bowel movements inspired tweets and

Tumblr entries, his dysfunctional
relationship with his then-partner powered
hours of podcasts, and his firing from
Community, his own cult TV creation,
fueled a 21-city bus tour and later a
documentary. A life of transparency, he
reasoned, was therapeutic, healthy even for
a guy who’d routinely describe himself as
self-loathing and self-destructive.

Then the culture changed. “It stopped being

punk rock to just say anything,” says
Harmon. And he changed, or at least he
tried to change. He embraced actual
therapy and largely retreated from the
public eye, shuttering both his popular
podcast and his prolific Twitter feed. He
found love in his personal life and balance
in his professional one, and then he
watched it all come dangerously close to
vanishing as his past caught up to him. But
now, at 50, he’s eager for an audience again.
He misses that “parasocial relationship”
with an army of devoted strangers, and the
platform to share whatever it is he’s
thinking as he’s thinking it. Harmon misses
holding court.

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So, here we are, sitting face-to-face at a

North Hollywood restaurant for his first
expansive profile in years, and he doesn’t
want to fuck this up. In fact, before he
Ubered over, he even sought counsel from
ChatGPT. “What is your advice for a
showrunner sitting down for an interview
with The Hollywood Reporter?” he asked. It
immediately spit out some tips, 10 of them
in total. He rattles off a few.

Dan Harmon Photographed by Lenne Chai

PHOTOGRAPHED BY LENNE CHAI

Familiarize yourself with your own show, its

themes, characters and the latest
developments.

“ChatGPT thinks we’re here to talk about

one show. I should have said, ‘As a mogul,’ ”
jokes Harmon, whose animation empire
includes three shows — Apple TV+’s
Strange Planet, Fox’s Krapopolis and the
seventh season of his Adult Swim
juggernaut Rick and Morty — all premiering
within the span of two months. There’s a
Community movie coming, too, which
Harmon fans have been clamoring for ever
since the series wrapped in 2015.

Show enthusiasm for your project and the

industry.

“And there has never been a better time to

be passionate about the industry,” he jokes
once more, referring to the many issues —
including the very use of AI — that have
prompted two major Hollywood guilds to
strike.

Be yourself.

Over the next six and a half hours, as

servers cycle through and Negronis flow
freely, that is the only piece of the advice he
heeded.

“I don’t have to be any less neurodivergent, but I’m

also not going to self-destruct by slowing everything
down.” Harmon on detoxing his writers rooms.
PHOTOGRAPHED BY LENNE CHAI

***

The last time I sat down with Harmon was

in a very different Hollywood. It was the
summer of 2013, and he’d just been rehired
at Community, his perpetually endangered,
critically adored NBC comedy, a year after
he was famously let go. At the time, he
insisted he was never given an explicit
reason for his firing, nor his rehiring, but
the stories of toxicity in his writers room,
where all-nighters were customary and his
liquor consumption was substantial
enough for Harmon to call himself a “ninja
of alcoholism,” were open secrets. There
was also his public feud with his
cantankerous star, Chevy Chase, and no
shortage of online jabs at the network and
its executives, who were always on him for
being over-schedule and over-budget.

Harmon reread the piece I wrote — “The

Rise and Fall (and Rise) of Dan Harmon” —
before seeing me again, or he read as much
of it as he could stomach. He says he got to
the part where two days after we had
spoken, he stood onstage at one of his
Harmontown live shows and compared
watching the season of Community that he
hadn’t participated in to “being held down
and watching your family get raped on a
beach.” Unsurprisingly, the comment didn’t
sit well with his bosses at NBC or studio
Sony, and he was forced to issue an
apology.

Unbeknownst to me at the time were the

panic attacks that Harmon was regularly
having during that period. “At one point, I
was sure I had either a tumor or that I was
going to have a heart attack, and my wife at
the time [ fellow comedian Erin McGathy]
kept saying, ‘You got fired from your NBC
show and you haven’t acknowledged it yet,’
and of course she was right,” says Harmon.
“I wasn’t acknowledging that I was hurt. I
never would have wanted to admit that.
Instead, I was so offended by the idea that I
was that trite a character. Having dizzy
spells [because I lost my job?] Like, I’m not
written by a hack.” A doctor ultimately
alleviated his fears, and the spells stopped
— but Harmon’s relationship didn’t endure.
He and McGathy ended their marriage after
just 11 months; all that remains is a couples
therapist, whom Harmon now sees on his
own. As he puts it, “Once it was clear the
marriage was never going to work, I asked
her, like, ‘Do you do this with individual
people? Because I’m kind of married to the
world, and you seem to understand that I
need more of these tools.’ ”

It’s not hard to see that Harmon views the

Community movie as his chance to right
some of his wrongs — both with the show’s
fans, whom he acknowledges have endured
more than they likely bargained for in
supporting him and his “drama queen”
ways, and with his cast, all of whom (save
for Chase) are set to return. He and one of
his former Community writers, Andrew
Guest, still need to hole up for a few days
and finish the script. They pitched it to
buyers, pre-pandemic, as a Greendale
Community College reunion, and they’re
committed to getting it to a place where
they can shoot it as is — or as close to as is
as possible without rewrites. “I don’t want
these now-superstar people, like Emmy-
winning Donald Glover, who are bothering
to gather out of loyalty to this thing, to
come back and once again be getting blue
pages run down by an intern that totally
contradict what they spent all night
memorizing,” says Harmon. “I want to have
a veneer of, ‘Here’s your reward.’ I don’t
want them to go, like, ‘Oh, he’s learned
nothing, he’s treating us like cattle again.’ ”

Dan Harmon was photographed Sept. 13, 2023, in

Eagle Rock, California. NN.07 jacket. PHOTOGRAPHED BY
LENNE CHAI

By all accounts, Harmon has learned plenty.

He’s in a considerably healthier place in his
life, and not just because, as his assistant-
turned-producing partner Steve Levy
describes it, he’s “no longer slamming
McDonald’s cheeseburgers.” The new
Harmon, who is noticeably thinner than
the old one, is even seeing a nutritionist,
with whom he regularly shares a food diary.
Today’s entry would include deviled eggs, a
chopped salad and a few Negronis. (Yes, he’s
still drinking. “If I didn’t, I’d look like Jack
LaLanne,” he jokes.) He’s also eight years
into a stable relationship with his now
fiancée, Jury Duty showrunner Cody Heller,
whom he calls the “woman of my dreams.”

He and Heller met through a mutual friend,

and they both acknowledge that there were
red flags, beginning with the very weekend
they got together. He had flown to New
York with a buddy for what was supposed
to be a first wedding anniversary trip with
McGathy; Heller, who’s 12 years his junior,
was there working on Deadbeat, a comedy
she’d co-created for Hulu. “I mean, it was
red-flag city,” she says now, “but we wound
up falling crazily in love.” They spent their
third date in Kansas City, celebrating
Thanksgiving with Heller’s family, which
Harmon, who’s largely estranged from his
family, has embraced as his own.

Harmon and his fiancée, Jury Duty showrunner Cody

Heller. PHILLIP FARAONE/PMC GETTY IMAGES

The two will eventually get married, though

neither seems interested in replicating the
kind of big, fancy wedding that Harmon
had the first go-round. As the story goes, he
wasn’t going to bother proposing because
he thought he’d lost all credibility once his
first marriage quickly imploded. “I said to
Cody, ‘Me standing up there going, like, “Oh,
this time I really mean it,” who would
believe me?’ ” he says. So, Heller proposed
instead, with a gold band she’d drunkenly
bought off Kay.com. The inscription reads
Dan Heller, which still tickles the feminist
in her.

At the urging of his therapist, Harmon has

tried to prioritize his mental health and his
happiness in ways he never had before. In
fact, he no longer allows himself to work
more than six hours a day, and his rooms
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have hard outs after only four. “I don’t have

to be any less neurodivergent than I ever
was, but I’m also not going to self-destruct
by slowing everything down anymore,” he
says, suggesting that he gets to be more of a
Willy Wonka character now, swooping in
and out as needed. It’s a marked change for
a guy whose eleventh-hour rewrites, or
“Harmon passes,” were once the stuff of
writers room lore.

“I used to think it was part of the job to

have your toothbrush at the office and that
a good employee did the same and you
tried to reward that person with an Emmy
or a credit that would allow them to launch
their own franchises,” he tells me. “I thought
the best I could do was win wars and my
soldiers would thank me later, or at the
very worst, they would have sacrificed
themselves for a noble cause, and that’s a
world where making a bad TV show is
worse than hurting a human being, which
doesn’t make much sense to me anymore.”

It turns out, Megan Ganz was one of those

human beings. In early 2018, as the #MeToo
movement was still gathering steam, she
probed Harmon over social media about
her mistreatment during her time as a
writer on Community. He had been
reckoning with his past in therapy for years
already, but now he was being asked to do
so before an audience of nearly 700,000
followers on the platform then known as
Twitter. In a series of posts, Harmon
accepted that he had treated Ganz “like
garbage” after she had rejected his
romantic advances, acknowledging that
he’d been “a selfish baby” and “an awful
boss.” A week later, he devoted seven
minutes of his podcast to the subject, giving
a full account of his wrongdoing. As his
entire career hung in the balance, he took
complete responsibility, detailing how he
had failed her and had justified it to
himself. The following day, Ganz forgave
him, first privately, then publicly, calling
Harmon’s admission a “masterclass in how
to apologize.”

Reflecting on it now, he insists he’s glad it

all came to light. Ganz’s narrative has been
returned to her, and his stomach is no
longer in knots. And though his lawyers
advised against his lengthy apology, he’s
glad he did that, too. “I felt like I owed
honesty there,” he says. “You make your
fucking brand about talking about your shit
and calling yourself an asshole, and then
you’re just leaving these parts out?” It’s the
same impulse that he says stopped him
from writing a book of essays that
Doubleday had commissioned a few years
before. It would have been his second book.
His first, You’ll Be Perfect When You’re Dead,
was a collection of musings from his old
blog, Dan Harmon Poops. “I basically got to
that chapter,” he says, referring to the
period that included Ganz, “and I just
stopped writing and gave the money back.”

Half a year after his first brush with

cancellation — and a matter of days after
his second (this time for a nearly decade-
old parody video featuring a baby rapist
that resurfaced online) — Harmon shut
down his Twitter account. He jokes now
that he should have done so the day
politicians like Barack Obama got an
account: “Someone smarter would have
been like, ‘OK, the squares are here, let’s get
out.’ ” The following year, after 360 episodes
of his Harmontown podcast, which he taped
live before a coterie of superfans, he signed
off that, too. To him, it felt like time. “I used
to think not only was I doing something for
myself by babbling into a microphone, but I
was also doing something for everyone else,
because everyone could benefit from this
idea that we all need to be more honest
with each other,” says Harmon. “But there’s
a very fine line between that and becoming
a brand that advertises selfishness and
saying it’s rock ’n’ roll not to consider
others. And when there’s a choice between
that and me being incredibly boring by
saying into a microphone, ‘I’ve been doing a
lot of thinking about others lately,’ silence
is easier.”

***

Rick and Morty was supposed to be

Harmon’s reward. He’d all but killed himself
making Community, only to feel like he was
constantly letting people down. Now, he
had a partner in Adult Swim, the nighttime
arm of the Cartoon Network, that actively
wanted to be in business with him. In fact,
executives there had courted him with the
promise that they’d love him the way that
NBC didn’t. And in the early days, working
on Rick and Morty was blissful, or as blissful
as any Dan Harmon production can be. It
wasn’t until season two that everything
started to change.

Let me back up here and tell you that

Harmon has never seen Rick and Morty as
his show. When Adult Swim first
approached him, he figured he’d be six
episodes and out unless he enlisted a
subversive animator like Justin Roiland
with big, crazy ideas. He had met Roiland
through Channel 101, the experimental film
festival that Harmon had founded in the
early aughts, between co-creating Heat
Vision and Jack and The Sarah Silverman
Program. “It’s not that I’m bereft of ideas,
but I wouldn’t know where to begin,”
explains Harmon. “I’m a character person
and a story person and an I-just-want-
people-to-like-me person.”

It was Roiland who suggested that they

revisit one of his zanier shorts, an off-color
parody of Back to the Future’s Marty McFly
and Doc Brown, which he’d drawn for
Channel 101 back in 2006. Harmon loved
the idea, and the two hired their 101 pals to
work with them. Initially, there was some
pushback from Adult Swim about Roiland
voicing both leads — in this case, a
narcissistic, alcoholic genius (Rick) and his
bumbling grandson (Morty) — but the
network ultimately caved and the series
premiered to widespread critical praise in
2013. And though the pair shares a co-
creator credit, Harmon has always been
sensitive to Roiland’s contributions. After
all, they were his voices and his characters,
even if many of the show’s writers suggest
they’ve modeled Rick after Harmon. (Not
all of them, however. Heather Anne
Campbell, who joined the show in 2020,
says the two have diverged over time: “Rick
may be very intelligent and caustically
funny like Dan, but the character is a
callous, terrified man and, at least in the
time I’ve been working here, Dan is open
and almost recursively self-aware.”)

What happened next still rattles Harmon,

which is one of the reasons he’s never
publicly addressed it until now. When the
show scored its second season, Harmon
was eager to staff up, filling out their ragtag
cable team with Harvard-educated
Community writers. If they were going to
make a play for network primetime
audiences, he reasoned, they’d need
network primetime writers. “If I had felt like
I was imposing something, I would have
never done it,” he says, having played the
whole thing back in his head countless
times over the past decade. He can see now
how Roiland must have felt that that
transition was about making the show
more Harmon’s than his, but he insists that
was not his intent.

“Other people’s safety and comfort got damaged while

I obsessed over a cartoon’s quality.” Harmon (left, with
Justin Roiland) TAYLOR HILL/FILMMAGIC

“If anything, what I wanted was for Justin

and I both to be able to be increasingly lazy
and not show up for work. That was the
dream,” says Harmon. “We’d be these rich
idea men. He could roll around and go, like,
‘What if a genie had a butt instead of a
dick?’ And I could be like, ‘Yeah, and plus,
we’re going to make people cry about it, and
that’s going to make them freak out. It’s a
story about a genie butt dick, but then we’d
win an Emmy, and it’d be more ironic than
ever.’ And then I’d come to find out later
that it was like, ‘Oh, Harmon brought in his
Harmon writers,’ and, man, that is not
how I saw it.”

Roiland started to pull back during season

two. By then, the room was working
considerably longer hours, as Harmon
obsessed over the show’s quality, and the
environment was no longer as much fun.
After the season wrapped, Roiland sat
down with Harmon and acknowledged just
how miserable he’d become working at the
show. The implication, according to
Harmon, was that it was his fault.
“Honestly, I wasn’t sure what he was saying,”
recalls Harmon, “other than, maybe, ‘I feel
like I’m in your shadow and I wish I
wasn’t.’ ”

Mike Lazzo, who was running Adult Swim

out of Atlanta at the time, was aware of the
growing tensions insomuch as he’d see
signs when he came to visit. “Dan would be
in the writers room and Justin would be
running radio control cars around the
studio,” says Lazzo, who gives Harmon the
lion’s share of the credit for Rick and Morty’s
success: “It’s so dependent on writing and
character, and those are Dan’s strengths. I
remember I’d get frustrated waiting on his
scripts, but then they’d arrive and they
would be masterpieces.”