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View Full Version : Warren Ellis on Dan Harmon's story circle



Morgan Evanar
Jan 24th, 2016, 02:21:21 PM
I need to kill Netflix. I flick it on if I'm eating at my desk and then it just kind of runs until it does that thing where it asks if you're asleep or dead. I found myself re-watching episodes of COMMUNITY. And I have an odd theory about why that show wasn't massively popular on broadcast tv. The sort of theory that is, honestly, a red flag that I'm spending too much time alone. But it's simply this: COMMUNITY became a structurally perfected 22-minute comedy show, and something that is perfected is weird and offputting.

Ten episodes into the first season, COMMUNITY does something so well-timed and structurally unassailably perfect -- tying a dozen characters and four different plotlines into, of all things, a musical number -- that it basically completed the enterprise of classical half-hour comedy television and the doors should have been locked after it.

Dan Harmon is unusually interested in structure, and has written brilliantly about it. (He's also unusually interested in cruelty, as RICK & MORTY attests.) Look at this:


http://panicked.org/circle.png

Harmon refers to this as a story circle. It's a distilled version of the Hero's Journey. This is the process he puts every character through in every story. Harmon's gift here is to cook down a whole bunch of thinking into a clever summation and a really useful hand tool.

I mean, it's not a secret - Aaron Sorkin, for example, has spoken about "what a character wants" as the guiding light of his tv writing. You can look at HANNIBAL, too, and see that Hannibal Lector is always the most interesting character in the room because his want is so clearly defined and cleverly wrought -- he wants to be understood and accepted by an equal, and Will Graham becomes negative space next to him because Graham's want is the absence of a want. But Harmon's really useful explication of all this theory, and applying it in the writer's room, leads to very interesting structural writing, and these fantastic vaulted cathedrals of storytelling.

The story circle system, complete with its return to the familiar situation -- "home" base is hugely important in episodic television, and takes on iconic resonances -- is the perfected mechanism of the classical half-hour tv comedy format.

And that's weird. Perfect things freak us out. They're not necessarily pleasurable experiences, and sometimes they have us look at each other and say "what the fuck was that?" It's creepy. Sometimes it seems precious and impenetrable. It challenges us, but on some level it also invites us to look away.

But it did give me an excuse to talk a bit about story circles and structure, which some of you might find useful. Learning.

Charley
Jan 24th, 2016, 02:39:44 PM
This is a really handy little pocket guide for plot structuring. I think a lot of us kind of blindly fumble at some aspect of this, but that's what's so interesting about the hero's journey is that at least some of it is already programmed into our DNA because it's human nature.

Thanks for the useful bit of insight.