Episode 5 – Andrew Guest

• Before Community, Andrew was on the first two seasons of 30 Rock as a writer’s assistant.
• Oddly enough at the time of the Pilot, Dan was not given the role of showrunner.
• The first few weeks of Pre Production was character camp
  • Writers would discuss things such as what’s Jeff’s relationship with Troy, vs Gillian
• Andrew knew Donald from 30 Rock.
• Donald was so young at 30 Rock that on his first week of Pre-Production, he had to leave to fulfill his obligations as RA in his dorm at NYU.
• After a Pilot is made, writers get together and start figuring things out such as what happens in Episode 2
  • Scenes are whiteboarded
  • Dan’s famous story circle is used
  • episodes are assigned to writers, who then break off for a week to write out the episode.
• Dan famously would take so long to write a draft that for the Pilot the Russo brothers went to his house and sit with him to get the draft completed.
• 30 Rock’s writer room tended to push for jokes, vs Community which would push for story
• Andrew wrote Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, despite never having played D&D
• Britta’s character was initially very underdeveloped, with just a sketch of “stereotypical hot cool girl.” The network really wanted to recast Gillian but Dan fought for her.
• Early on not knowing how to drive home Britta’s comedy a lot of editing was done to make her more comedic. Later on Andrew says they figured out how to make her a lot more fun to write for to make her funny.
• Andrew wrote Advanced Criminal Law, which is the focus of this pod.
• This episode featured Britta crying, which got to show off Gillian’s dramatic acting chops.
• Writing Chevy’s song, one of the first things Andrew did was use a rhyming dictionary on Greendale which is where slop pail came from.
• Writing for Chang was tricky, in that his humor was very cartoonish, and it proved to be difficult to have a character arc for a very cartoonish character, but at this point they just enjoyed the cartoon.
• This was the first appearance of Starburns and Leonard in speaking roles, and as such Andrew would get character payments each time those characters reappeared later on.
• Andrew worked on the first two seasons, then came back for the series finale.
• At 10am on Monday morning when the episode was set to shoot – there was no story, it was not even broken.
• Regarding Season 4 – it does feel like an imposter season. Some shows can swap out the show runner, but Community’s vision was so much of Dan’s voice Andrew feels that it didn’t work.
• A season of tv is about 9-10 months.
• During pre-production nothing but writing is happening, but once production starts you’re shooting.
• You shoot for three weeks, you take one off, each of those weeks is shooting an episode.
• As a writer, once your last episode is done, you’re done, so you might go out and help on set.
• Community writers would typically do at least one all-nighter a week, and a lot of weekends.
• Andrew really related to the Troy/Abed friendship, if not either character individually.
• Also Britta – his favorite character to write for by the middle of season 1.
  • some of the politics
  • the self-defeating nature
  • getting in your own way
  • clumsiness

Thanks to MinotaurMan for the research