The creative force behind 'Rick and Morty,' 'Community' and 'Krapopolis' was once a say-anything provocateur until a changing culture, a few brushes with cancellation and lots of therapy scared him into silence. But boy does he miss his soapbox.

Once upon a time, Dan Harmon shared absolutely everything – his bowel movements inspired tweets and Tumblr entries, his dysfunctional relationship with his then-partner powered hours of podcasts, and his firing from Community, his own cult TV creation, fueled a 21-city bus tour and later a documentary. A life of transparency, he reasoned, was therapeutic, healthy even for a guy who’d routinely describe himself as self-loathing and self-destructive.

However, the culture changed, and Harmon adapted. He embraced actual therapy and largely retreated from the public eye, shuttering both his popular podcast and his prolific Twitter feed. He found love in his personal life and balance in his professional one, and then he watched it all come dangerously close to vanishing as his past caught up to him.

Now, at 50, Harmon is eager for an audience again. He misses that “parasocial relationship” with an army of devoted strangers, and the platform to share whatever it is he’s thinking as he’s thinking it. Harmon misses holding court.

So, here we are, sitting face-to-face at a North Hollywood restaurant for his first expansive profile in years, and he doesn’t want to fuck this up. In fact, before he Ubered over, he even sought counsel from ChatGPT. “What is your advice for a showrunner sitting down for an interview with The Hollywood Reporter?” he asked. It immediately spit out some tips, 10 of them in total. He rattles off a few.

Familiarize yourself with your own show, its themes, characters and the latest developments. Harmon, whose animation empire includes three shows – Apple TV+’s Strange Planet, Fox’s Krapopolis and the seventh season of his Adult Swim juggernaut Rick and Morty – all premiering within the span of two months.

Show enthusiasm for your project and the industry. “And there has never been a better time to be passionate about the industry,” he jokes once more, referring to the many issues – including the very use of AI – that have prompted two major Hollywood guilds to strike.

Be yourself.

Over the next six and a half hours, as servers cycle through and Negronis flow freely, that is the only piece of advice Harmon heeded.

The last time I sat down with Harmon was in a very different Hollywood. It was the summer of 2013, and he’d just been rehired at Community, his perpetually endangered, critically adored NBC comedy, a year after he was famously let go. At the time, he insisted he was never given an explicit reason for his firing, nor his rehiring, but the stories of toxicity in his writers room, where all-nighters were customary and his liquor consumption was substantial enough for Harmon to call himself a “ninja of alcoholism,” were open secrets.

Harmon reread the piece I wrote – “The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of Dan Harmon” – before seeing me again, or he read as much of it as he could stomach. He says he got to the part where two days after we had spoken, he stood onstage at one of his Harmontown live shows and compared watching the season of Community that he hadn’t participated in to “being held down and watching your family get raped on a beach.” Unsurprisingly, the comment didn’t sit well with his bosses at NBC or studio Sony, and he was forced to issue an apology.

Unbeknownst to me at the time were the panic attacks that Harmon was regularly having during that period. “At one point, I was sure I had either a tumor or that I was going to have a heart attack, and my wife at the time [fellow comedian Erin McGathy] kept saying, ‘You got fired from your NBC show and you haven’t acknowledged it yet,’ and of course she was right,” says Harmon.

It’s not hard to see that Harmon views the Community movie as his chance to right some of his wrongs – both with the show’s fans, whom he acknowledges have endured more than they likely bargained for in supporting him and his “drama queen” ways, and with his cast, all of whom (save for Chase) are set to return.