ONTD

Grantland followed Dan Harmon on some dates of his recent Harmontown live podcast tour. In between tidbits like that the second season of Community was "brought to you by Adderall" and that Harmon once put a Sharpie up his butt to see if he was into that sort of thing, is one good old-fashioned diatribe. When asked why 30 Rock was able to stay on the air as a poorly rated yet very smart show, Harmon goes off, espousing a very "everything is bullshit" message. He calls all TV, regardless of quality, "a bunch of goddamn baby food made out of corn syrup." Read the whole thing below. Don't worry, it has a George Orwell reference.

"When 30 Rock lands on the cover of Rolling Stone, when any television show is lionized for being "smart," someone's laughing all the way to the bank — some company, it used to be General Electric, but now it's Comcast. That there's a difference between any of this shit is the greatest joke that television ever told. I mean, as the creator of Community, I'm telling you: It's all garbage. And the idea that my garbage, y'know, needed a better time slot or deserved an Emmy or didn't deserve an Emmy, the idea that it was better or worse than 30 Rock or Arrested Development or Freaks and Geeks and all that shit — you only have to take a couple steps back before you realize that you're looking at a bunch of goddamn baby food made out of corn syrup. It's just a big blob of fucking garbage. The medium is dispensed to people who can't feed back, can't change it, who only get it in 20-minute chunks interrupted by commercials, and you're watching either really well-written jokes or so-so-written jokes or terribly written jokes, but you're just watching jokes written by a bunch of people who all have one thing in common: They're not allowed to say whatever they're thinking! They're not allowed. You're definitely not getting truth; you're getting lies.

Now, so why does this concept of "meta" and smart TV and snobbery — like, why does it offend people? Why can't you just say, "I don't like that show; it's not my cup of tea. I prefer this show"? Because we're programmed to hate ourselves for being stupid. We are told that the goal is to be smart, and to differentiate between good and bad, and then we are told, from left to right, what is good and bad, and then we are told to go at each other's throats. And that's why, if a television show like Community has an element to it where someone says, "This feels a lot like a television show," you can't just ignore that — you can't just take it or leave it. You have to violently — like, it's a political issue. It's like, you gotta fight it; you gotta hate it.

If you're a critic, you have to write your 90-page review of it that takes longer to read than it does to watch the episode, prattling endlessly in this pseudo-intellectual way, filling the next tier down's head with this language that they can use to talk about the show over coffee. The conversation we're not having is: "Hey, there's 250 million of us watching an average of six hours a day of a one-way transmission that only ever tells us that we are all animals and that we should buy Cottonell." That's the one conversation no one is having, not a single one of us. Well, I mean, there are a couple people having it; they're on street corners covered in tattoos with their dicks pierced, and they're holding signs saying, "Honk if you want to burn down the White House." Those people are not marketable; we put them in the same drawer as homeless people; they're weird characters, putting flyers on your windshield and walking around barefoot and freaking out about the fact that this Orwellian nightmare is happening, and we're all inside having these debates about whether or not liking 30 Rock makes us smart or stupid."

Read the rest here.

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