In this era of fragmenting audiences and declining shares for the broadcast networks, do you have a sense of the audience you’re making your shows for?STEVE LEVITAN: When I write, 90 percent of the time I am picturing it through the eyes of other comedy writers.
DAN HARMON: That’s what we do, too — we assume that everyone in the audience is a genius, and write for the most jaded person you can imagine. Sometimes someone so jaded that they don’t exist.
LEVITAN: But that’s a problem. If you go for the most jaded person, you can really screw yourself up by being too cool for school. Another part of me thinks about the fans, the people who really just like the show and love these characters.
HARMON: Yeah, when we were first launching our show, I was honored to be characterized as part of this post-ironic movement in TV. The grunge, and the lack of eye contact, and the self-deprecation and the self-loathing was coming to a conclusion, and now we were once again acting like there were still 200 million people watching every night, and that we were dividing them among three networks. Because there’s a craftsmanship brought to bear from that: Mom’s watching, Dad’s watching, the kids are watching, that’s TV when it was at it’s best. And in order to make the best TV, should you pretend that you’re still living in that world? “Modern Family” definitely has that purity and that optimism. And even though we get characterized as snarky and clever, there is a lot of optimism to “Community.”
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