Wow! You expect this sort of thing in a political campaign or maybe from a celebrity trying to deal with the fall-out of a sex-tape scandal, but this is insane. In the wake of Sony’s abrupt firing of Dan Harmon — which, again, Harmon found out in the news, same as the rest of us — Sony gave the cast helpful talking points presumably so they’d know how to keep their mouth shut and toe the company line. Soulless a**holes. The moral wrong committed is not bad enough, they have to compound it with a lazy attempt to put a good face on it. Here are the talking points, obtained by The Hollywood Reporter:
Team Community:
With last night’s news of David Guarascio and Moses Port as new showrunners/EPs on “Community” running in the press, and since we know that cast members have interviews coming up this week, I wanted to forward some messaging we hope our cast will find helpful as they navigate questions that will undoubtedly come up. I know that David and Moses are reaching out to them all directly but I’ve also heard from some of the actors that they’d like some guidance on the topic.
I saw some of the tweets that went out and were glad they all addressed their own sentiments quickly, and we’re hoping that the news will lose some steam over the next day, especially if we’re not perpetuating the topic in any way.
We’re tracking the coverage and conversation and will circle back if we feel the need to reshift our plan or messaging. Please let me know if you have questions.
Why did Dan get let go from the show?
We’re not made aware of why staffing changes take place but I will always be grateful to Dan for his great work on the show and wish him only the best. We’re also excited that we’ll be back on NBC’s schedule in the fall and are looking forward to working on those episodes.
Were you aware that Dan was going to be let go?
No, that’s not something we’re consulted on. I’m sad to see him go but I am looking forward to starting our next 13 episodes of “Community.”
Did the studio or network consult with you about these changes?
No they didn’t but we’re looking forward to working with David Guarascio & Moses Port on a new season of Community.
What are their plans for the new season?
It’s a little early to say at this point but we’re looking forward the stories our characters will find themselves in come Sept.
The note in the beginning of the memo was particularly distasteful, as the suggestion was, “Good. I’m glad you passed along your condolences to Harmon as quickly as possible. Now shut up about it so we can kill this story already.” The whole thing is horribly condescending, too. Does the network not think that these guys — who clearly would like to keep their jobs through at least the next 13 episodes — can’t act like professionals? They need to be told what to say? They’re comedic actors, you think that they’re going to limit their statements to crappy PR-speak?
This whole thing is like a window into the soul of Sony, and what do we see inside? Nothing. Just a vast emptiness.
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Oh, come on. The only one who would say anything douchey is Chevy, and he’s probably on NBC/Sony’s side anyway.
Besides, nothing they do is going to kill this story. THE INTERNET REMEMBERS.
Apparently Chevy wasn’t thrilled about this, according to Danmon.
Huh. Maybe Pierce being less dickish in the finale has roots in real life.
No it doesn’t. Small pockets here and there do, but most everyone is already talking about whether or not what that dickhead did counts as sky-diving without a parachute.
People suck online, offline, and everywhere in between.
love the show. in awe of harmon’s vision. this situation sucks. but the time for “moving on” is fast approaching.
Word. I’m already tired of this story.
Dan Harmon is an asshole, The End.
Regardless of your tolerance level for this story’s coverage, it isn’t all because “Dan Harmon is an asshole.” Rather, the lesson is that everyone is an asshole to varying degrees, but Sony is the biggest, gaping, most disgusting asshole. Dan Harmon is only a tiny asshole.
I’m not saying Sony handled this well (they clearly didn’t). But Sony is a business and they made a business decision. We Community fans are the only people that hold it in such high esteem. It’s more than a show to us. The folks at Sony and NBC view it as an asset, plain and simple. They are a company, that’s what they do.
Since everybody loves complaining, I’ll get in on it, too. If you’re not interested, don’t click on the story. Just scroll past.
I think it’s less an inside view of Sony and more a facet of just how soul-sucking show business is conducted.
i hate it when one of my favorite tv shows replaces it’s head writer with inferior writers. its almost as bad as when one of my favorite blog replaces its head writer with an unfunny moronic dipshit. man, sometimes i just feel like all the bad things in life only happen to me!
+1
-3
+Ufford
slow. clap.
Is Josh or Danger the Megan Ganz in this analogy?
I like how people are convinced the writers are inferior and the show is ruined before a single new episode has aired. THE SKY IS FALLING! THE SKY IS FALLING!
@Jezzer
the show is simply inferior since it’s Dan Harmon’s invented little world and he is no longer there to create it. The story was being written with a specific ending in mind, now we won’t see it, it’s the great/worse thing about a guy like Dan Harmon and the world they create, it’s all their own, and we wont see what was intended which sucks.
It’s typical business “we did something, but we hope anyone who might be angered by it will forget it happened because we actually don’t care what they think” strategy. This is not exclusive to tv, unfortunately.
Exactly, anyone who works for a large corporation sees this regularly. I get tons of messages in my work e-mail inbox each week telling me how I’m supposed to act in front clients. I never read any of them.
The best is when you predict a decision pissing clients off, warn the people making the decision it’s going to anger people, get ignored, watch clients freak out, get blamed for the clients’ anger, get put in charge of managing the clusterfuck, then get talking points.
Not that I’m pulling from multiple occasions in my own career or anything…
Yeah, I work in PR and often cringe as I type many of the same types of sentences you see above. Answer as politely and quickly as possible; pivot toward what’s next. Stupid but necessary.
I don’t see the big deal especially since it says the cast asked for some guidance.
Sony isn’t supposed to have a soul, it’s a corporation. Letting go of Harmon is “morally wrong”? You people are getting a little ridiculous.
“Sony isn’t supposed to have a soul, it’s a corporation”
Cue in next season a new character called Sonny a-la-Subway from this season sticking around like part of the group like Buddy did in season 2, except for all 13 eps. instead of the one..
They can’t get me to forget things I have a mind like– LOOK! A SQUIRREL ON A SKATEBOARD! HA HA! AWESOME!!!
Best case scenario: They repeat these talking points like robots.
Preferably all together on set of The Soup.
Possibly while pretending to read them from a piece of paper.
Glad to see that the PR professional who prepped Woody Harrelson for his Reddit AMA found work writing memos for Sony.
I think the best joke would be for them to ALL recite the memo word for word for word. I’m sure a mashup of every actor’s interview with those ver batim statements would be fantastic.
“but I’ve also heard from some of the actors that they’d like some guidance on the topic” probably = Sony didn’t like the cast saying nice things about Harmon, and the cast said “well wtf am I supposed to say, then?”
The way I see it, it’s like a really bad and awkward breakup. The cast and writers are still “dating” Sony (and NBC) for another thirteen episodes, but Sony/NBC just broke up with Harmon. Everyone was friends with each other, but the checks come from Sony/NBC. Because of that elevated shred of allegiance to the well of money, the cast and writers can only do so much without risking another bad situation. That probably made no sense, but I think everyone’s been in a situation where your friend breaks up with someone who later became your friend.
Fuck it, Dude, I’m going bowling.
Hey guys, Dan Harmon is probably kinda rich, can we stop crying for him?
I think people are more upset about how it will impact the show.
Harmon is an asshole and an idiot for not being able to be more reasonable to work with, Sony is a soul sucking corporation. Put them together and the show and the fans lose.
Community will be gone after 13 as it needs to be. The great thing/problem with guys like Dan Harmon and a show like Community, is that he is more than just the showrunner to it.
Losing just a showrunner even a good one, you can replace a good showrunner with another good showrunner, but and I’m about to go all Inception…Harmon’s mind is the architect of that whole world. He’s a Joss Whedon type (yeh yeh I’m a fan). It’s Harmon’s show, his own little universe, his own voice. It just doesn’t exist without him. Not in the way it was intended
What really sucks is they clearly were building towards a conclusion, we’re like 80% of the way there. And Harmon can’t finish it, again he shares blame for that, but the show was right there at the finish line, and now we’ll get…. whatever we get.
It’ll be just a college hangout show next season… which is what I thought it was and why I wasn’t watching it when it first came on until my friends convinced me which was right around the last third of season 1 where they were getting really inventive and creative. And then I went back and caught up and went all in with my love for the show.
Now we’ll most likely get 13 episodes of what I wasnt interested in watching in the first place. I’m not going to bullshit and say I won’t watch, I will, but I have a feeling I’ll be hoping 13 episodes is the last of it and it just ends as mercifully as it can at this point.
How could Sony possibly foresee a boss’ staff responding as unprofessionally and contentiously as their former boss? MORAL OUTRAGE. /shakes fist
I. Am. Sad. To See Dan. Go. Great Memories. Looking forward to. New. Season.
/Answer-tron 2000
Those clowns in Congress did it again. What a bunch of clowns.
Well, hot dog! We have a weiner.
You know how I know that the writer of that post has never worked in corporate America? That this type of memo is some kind of big “news.”
Whenever a top person leaves abruptly, a merger occurs, large cutbacks, etc., anyone that would possibly have any type of media or outward facing position that would have these types of questions asked of them ALWAYS gets something like this. Can’t tell you how many I’ve gotten.
Is it a bit of odd 1984 groupspeak? Yes. But a company wants a specific message going out, not “Duh, I don’t know?” or “I think he killed a hooker or something” or “This place has sucked for years” or any other non-endorsed messages going out that could negative affect their business.
Now, if you think about it- when it comes to Community and what the cast says about working on the show and working with Dan Harmon, for as horrible as he is supposed to be, you really don’t get that message from the cast. Which leads me to think that this is not the first memo they’ve ever gotten…
Dear employees,
We understand that you’re upset that we fired your boss who everyone admits was an asshole and terrible to work with. Please feel free to support him in the press as he trashes the company that pays your salary and supported this project despite it’s limited appeal and lack of commercial success.
Signed,
No for-profit entity, ever.
And can we stop justifying everything by saying it was a business decision?? Thanks to the internet the world is far too small a place for anything to be just a business decision. FFS, slavery could be justified as a business decision.
+1
Thanks to the internet the world is far too small a place for anything to be just a business decision.
lolwut?
This site needs way to rate down retarded rhetorical nonsense like this until the user isn’t allowed to post. Really? You’re comparing slavery to this situation? BUSINESS ARE ALLOWED TO MAKE DECISIONS. There’s no ethical violation here and certainly no legal one. Grow up. The internet hasn’t made the world as small as you think just because you read the same six websites. You’ve just made YOUR world and YOUR view of it smaller.
2 points.
1) Someone up top referred to this as a business decision, a decision made to increase profits. My point is that thanks to the internet a lot more people know a lot more stuff that enables them to call a lot more bullshit. This wasn’t a business decision per say. In fact the moves of Sony to move it to Friday (death slot), only give it a 13 episode order (thereby diminishing chances at syndication), and change the show runner (who’s loyal cult following is likely to have followed the show to Friday) all in a short time span don’t seem to make much business sense at all. So I can’t agree that this was a business decision. Sure Harmon was probably a huge asshole to work with, but I don’t see it translating to a business decision. If it was it was a bad one.
2) My point about slavery was in reference to the general use of the term business decision and does not pertain to the Community situation at all. We use the term to justify all kinds of decisions without actually explaining (or justifying) the decision at all. Specifically my point is that labeling something a business decision is giving someone a free pass when maybe they don’t deserve one. Of course businesses are required to make decisions every day, but all decisions have consequences. For the most part those consequences stem from what we as a society say is acceptable, which as you know changes all the time. Moving your plant to Taiwan where you can pay a line worker $5 a week? Business decision. Fighting the abolition of slavery because without the free labor your agricultural economy can’t sustain itself and its absence would render you powerless? Business decision.
I know that was long and definitely meandering (I have ADD and putting this together in a somewhat coherent manner was fucking hell) but hopefully it makes sense. I’m pretty much right, whether or not I explained myself well enough for you to agree with me remains to be seen.
If in fact I have failed to get my point across there’s this:
TROY BARNES SAID YOU’RE A NAZI!!! NAZI NAZI NAZI !!!!!!
WTF? This was by definition a business decision, as it was a decision, made by a business. Whether or not you think it was a GOOD business decision is a separate issue, and an issue on which I doubt anyone on this blog is even 10% as knowledgeable as the people who actually, you know, made the decision.
Also, people don’t know how “talking points” work. They’re talking POINTS. It’s not a script. They can go on TV and diddle themselves while singing the alphabet as long as they hit the point in there and don’t go off message.
Comedic actors they may be, but they’re employees as well. So if they want to stay employed, they’ll read the fucking talking points and shut their mouths until the season is over.
I doubt that if the creator/showrunner of almost any other TV program got unceremoniously canned–and, it sounds like, not without some blame to be laid at his own feet–the breathless fanboys who write this site would be getting all huffy, throwing around phrases like “moral wrong,” and decrying Sony’s vast emptiness. All without a single joke for levity. It’s pathetic and alienating.
Also, Dan Harmon’s best work was as Ted Templeman on Yacht Rock.
Goddamn that’s cynical. Suddenly a TV show becomes a political party. I mean, I can understand getting rid of Harmon over the way he handled the whole Chevy Chase thing (not that I would’ve made the same decision, but I understand it), but to start telling the cast and crew what they can and can’t say about that move? That’s too much.
I like how if you express one iota of sadness or regret over Dan Harmon’s firing, on a thread about Community no less, you are “a baby” that needs to “grow up” because “this is how business works.” Thanks, internet tough guys.
What I’m getting from this thread is Sony is a corporation. Sony does not have a soul. Only people have souls. Therefore corporations are not people. Someone, quick, inform Mitt Romney!
I really don’t even know what to say about this. I’m remaining cautiously optimistic, but I’m ready for when this show falls apart halfway through season 4.
This story is really….. Oh, sorry, dozed off for a sec. Wait what are we discussing?
Just curious, has anyone stopped to think that maybe the show might be better off without Harmon?
nope. it was harmon’s story for 80% of it, now we get an alternate ending. whether it’s good or not, it’s just a shame we won’t get the creator of the story’s ending. it’s both harmon and sony’s fault. sucks for the fans.
Here’s some Harmon goodness for you. [www.channel101.com]
“Insert problem, express condolences, say you didn’t know & that nothing will change, switch topic abruptly to something that makes the fans happy enough to shut up.”
Ex: Sony’s apology is really disgusting, I’m sorry that Harmon had to be fired that way because I’m totally grateful for his work, we’re really not informed about this kind of stuff, but we’re excited to be starting the next season of Community!
Sony/NBC: Making good decisions, all the time! Now shut the f*ck up about it, you’re costing us money.