To this day, Harmon still studies each film and TV show he watches, searching for his algorithm underneath, checking to see if the theory is airtight. If a plot doesn’t follow these steps, the embryo is invalid, and he starts over. Harmon calls his circles embryos - they contain all the elements needed for a satisfying story - and he uses them to map out nearly every turn on Community, from throwaway gags to entire seasons. “Some simplicity.” So he watched a lot of Die Hard, boiled down a lot of Joseph Campbell, and came up with the circle, an algorithm that distills a narrative into eight steps:ħ. “I was thinking, there must be some symmetry to this,” he says of how stories are told. He wanted to codify the storytelling process - to find the hidden structure powering the movies and TV shows, even songs, he’d been absorbing since he was a kid. He began doodling the circles in the late ’90s, while stuck on a screenplay.

Harmon, 38, is the creator of Community, a sitcom about a group of community-college study buddies and the most giddily experimental show on network TV. Each one is hand-drawn and divided into quadrants with scribbled notes and numbers sprouting along the edges. They’re on the whiteboards around Dan Harmon’s office, on sheets tacked to his walls, on a notepad on the floor of his car. The circles are everywhere, if you know to look for them. It’s a long piece so let me zero in on Harmon’s approach to the story-crafting process: I suspect we have many fans of the TV series “Community” and “Rick and Morty”, so my guess is there will be a lot of interest in this Wired article featuring the show’s creator Dan Harmon. I’ve updated it with a video featuring Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey and a detailed explanation of Harmon’s take. From the archives, a February 2012 post featuring Dan Harmon’s ‘circle theory’ of Story.

Dan harmon hero&#39;s journey

Dan harmon hero's journey