An ear to the social network

When writer Dan Harmon learned through social media that the audience for his show “Community” was feeling less than neighborly toward one of its characters, the avid Twitterer admitted, he was influenced by the comments. However, missives from his nearly 50,000 followers often don’t have the effect on the show that the tweeters might have hoped. Sometimes he likes to amp up the very thing bothering the fans.

“If people are responding to a character negatively or a situation negatively, I may very well slam on that gas pedal and combine it with a different color for purposes of creating some kind of depth to the painting,” Harmon (@danharmon) says.

In this case, the negative feedback that Harmon received was about community college student Britta, played by Gillian Jacobs, whom many female fans didn’t see as a worthy romantic adversary for Jeff (Joel McHale). Instead of eliminating Britta’s unappealing characteristics, Harmon made the fact that women don’t like her an integral part of her character.

Harmon says he values the direct connection that social media sites like Twitter and Facebook allow him to have with people who watch his show.

“I think people who follow me on Twitter really appreciate the idea that they have access to me, that Mr. Rogers is in the neighborhood,” he says.

But Harmon, like several other show runners, keeps a healthy perspective on whatever the audience is saying.

“It would be a mistake to allow this very specific demographic to have creative control over the show, but I also think it would be a huge mistake to be blind to what was happening to the individual while they’re watching the TV show,” he says.

Seeing how an episode plays as it’s airing is also a huge plus for “Modern Family’s” Steven Levitan (@stevelevitan), who says that he and co-creator Christopher Lloyd sometimes check Twitter feeds when they’re not sure if they’ve hit the mark.

“We’re just so worried about it, and then you put it out there and people either don’t notice or don’t have the same issue with it that you had,” Levitan explains.

Besides providing the audience with a sense of intimacy and shared experience with a series, social media can provide much-needed context for the overnight ratings.

“Viewer statistics are a cloud of data, and they don’t reflect any individual emotional experience with the product,” Harmon says. “Twitter is access to individual emotional viewer experience.”

Even in the show’s second season, Harmon says, he still searches #community while he’s watching the East Coast feed.

“I get more important information from individuals who don’t know that I’m watching and reading what they’re saying,” he says.

Though Levitan says he doesn’t search #modernfamily as often as he did in the first season, when he does look he always tries “not to overreact to the comments.”

“If you listen too hard to what the audience says they want, then you’re not being true to yourself as a writer and you’re not staying true to the characters,” he says.

“Bones” creator Hart Hanson (@harthanson), who used to be active on Twitter and now just reads his followers’ feeds, says the noisy minority eventually led him to stop engaging directly with viewers altogether.

“If you take everybody’s ideas — even if they’re all good — your show will turn to pudding,” Hanson says. “I have my hands full fighting off the smart, brilliant people that I work with, much less the public.”

“House’s” Katie Jacobs says she has purposefully stayed off social media for self-preservation’s sake.

“Viewers expect that there’s some sort of deeper insight into the show through someone on the show, and we are lucky enough to have that person be [fellow executive producer] Greg Yaitaines [@gregyaitaines] and not me. My skin is way too thin,” she says.

However, Jacobs relishes how social media can rally an audience through word of mouth.

“It used to be that you’d talk about these shows at the water cooler, and now the water cooler is worldwide,” Jacobs says.

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