27: Dan Harmon story circle
In the 1990s, TV writer Dan Harmon stripped down Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey” into a more universal “story circle,” especially useful for developing episodes of TV.
While the story circle powers the highly structured half-hours of his hit shows Community and Rick & Morty, Harmon originally developed the circle for his colleagues at competitive film fest Channel 101. Each Channel 101 submission was a 5-minute episode; winning entries got to submit another episode the next month. Creators were basically building a web series. So the story circle is optimized for compressed storytelling: no “refusal of the call” or “meeting with the goddess” required. It’s equally useful for analyzing an existing story.
Dan Harmon story circle
A character is in a zone of comfort: Nick Douglas (“I”), recent high school graduate, has a summer left before college starts.
They desire something: Nick wants money and a taste of “adult” professionalism.
They enter an unfamiliar situation: Nick sells knives from a catalog. This requires convincing friends and family that the knives are worth exorbitant prices — prices better suited to his better-off colleagues from real private schools, born to parents in white-collar jobs, with garages and cable.
They adapt to the situation: Nick develops a fanatical faith in the knives, rendering his sales pitch pathetically sincere. This adaptation isn’t enough to actually sell knives, but he’s too blinded to step back and consider what would make his prospects want the knives.
They get what they desired: Finally, and despite himself, Nick sells a knife to his mom, as a gift for his dad. It’s not even a kitchen knife like most of the product line. It’s a jackknife. But he’s sure it’s a great buy.
They pay a heavy price: Nick gets the knife in the mail and shows it off to his mom, still trying to prove these knives’ quality. And he slices his palm open. His faith in the knives proves self-defeating. He almost misses the flight to his church missions trip (not foreshadowed), but he’s bailed out again by his mom.
They return to their familiar situation: Nick goes on his missions trip, then to college, then back home next summer, when he works at a donut chain, much more like his previous food service jobs.
The journey has changed them: At the donut job, Nick is somewhat chastened. He’s tried more “professional” “self-starter” work and failed. But as he counts the ways this is not his fault, he freshly resents the children of the professional class. He has taken on, in the words of cartoonist Dorothy Gambrell, “jealousy masquerading as class consciousness.” He will make all these mistakes again, and the story will repeat.
I was gonna connect all that with the postmodernist structure of the following Simple Town sketch, but I don’t have time for that. Here’s a silly video I like.