'Community' Creator Dan Harmon Discovered He Has Asperger's Syndrome

[Brian Damage]

This Wired profile on Community creator and showrunner Dan Harmon explains and explores some of his unusual methods of plotting out what happens on the show: Harmon rigorously maps out character arcs in an eight-point cycle and refers to these story ideas as "embryos." That obsessiveness and ritualism make a little more sense at the end of the story, when Harmon explains that he has a form of Asperger's. He says he started researching the disorder as part of exploring Abed's character, but the information wound up hitting surprisingly close to home. "I started looking up these symptoms," he says, "just to know what they are. And the more I looked them up, the more familiar they started to seem." He met with a doctor and found out that Asperger's itself covers a spectrum of behaviors, some of which include what Wired calls Harmon's "inappropriate emotional reactions and deep empathy." Harmon says he started writing Community seeing himself as a Jeff type, but now he more closely identifies with Abed. Alas, no word on who his Troy is.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/09/mf_harmon/