Harmontown

» see harmontown.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Dan Harmon had a sitcom on NBC and wanted a room where nothing was written down. From 23 May 2011 he hosted a monthly show in the NerdMelt Showroom, the back space of Meltdown Comics on Sunset Boulevard, with Jeff B. Davis beside him. On 16 June 2012 the recordings started going out weekly as a podcast, and that is the date the show counts as its own beginning.

Episodes ran between one and two hours with no topic and no guest list. The logo put two faces inside a laurel wreath over the motto SCRIBIMUS LATINUM SINE INTELLECTUM, which is a joke that explains the show in one line if you can read it. The podcast was carried by Feral Audio from 2012 to 2017 and by Starburns Audio from 2018 to 2019. In January 2013 the whole thing went on the road for twenty dates, which Neil Berkeley filmed for a documentary that premiered at South by Southwest on 8 March 2014. Australia got a tour in 2016. Between October 2017 and June 2018 there was no audience in the room at all, because the permits at Starburns Studios did not allow one, and then the show moved to Dynasty Typewriter at The Hayworth.

Episode 360 was called "Cliffhanger!" and was taped on 2 December 2019 with most of the regular cast on stage, which en.wikipedia records as a run ending the next day. The show sold its own ending the way it had sold every other night: "The final Harmontown starts in 90 minutes! It's not too late to sign up on http://Harmontown.com to watch live!" Then the feed went quiet for fourteen months.

In February 2021 they sold tickets again, for a one-off reunion stream on the 21st. The video went up as episode 361 on 10 March and the audio arrived on 18 March, titled "Nanjianimax", with Rob Schrab and Kumail Nanjiani on it. That is the last thing in the feed.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the man from the audience ~

Early on, Harmon wanted a Dungeons and Dragons game in the show and asked the room whether anybody could run one. Spencer Crittenden put his hand up and ran it, then stayed for the rest of the show's life as a third voice on stage. He is still working: one of the two links on what is left of harmontown.com points at his podcast.

~ a store that outlived the show ~

The last full capture of the site, from 10 August 2024, is a working WordPress install with a member menu down the side. "Change Membership" and "Cancel Subscription" are both still in it, three and a half years after the final episode. The top of the page is advertising a free nonstop fifteen-day stream of every video episode in order, mixed in with Rob Schrab's own back catalog.

Harmontown's economy was always a room first. You bought a ticket, or later you bought a subscription to watch the room from somewhere else. From Ankara the only version on offer was the audio, which is the leftovers of something that happened in one building on one night, and I never minded that about it. The membership page was aimed at everybody who could not get to Sunset Boulevard in person, and it went on selling them that access for three and a half years after the last episode.

~ the month the domain gave up ~

The Internet Archive brackets the closure to four weeks. The capture of 10 August 2024 is a whole site at 12,133 bytes in the archive's own accounting; the capture of 8 September 2024 is 1,470. What answers today is 1,709 bytes long and says "Harmontown.com is closed", then points visitors at Schrab Home Video and at Spencer's podcast.

Under that sits the copyright line, "2012-2024 Harmontown Productions LLC", which dates the company's last year better than any announcement did. Beside it is the only other link on the page. It goes to Billing Support.

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