On Brand / How work gets passed down, and what changes on the way

Sources

Source claims and project synthesis are kept apart on purpose. It should stay obvious when an interview states something directly, when a script contains an exact recurrence, and when this project argues that a set of observations forms a pattern.

External

  1. Community creator Dan Harmon, The A.V. Club, 2010-09-23What it proves: That an interviewer put the NewsRadio ensemble rule, attributed to Paul Simms, directly to Harmon, and that Harmon described Community as consciously pursuing the same objective from the first episode forward. It does not prove that any individual later scene was copied.
  2. Dan Harmon walks us through Community's second season, The A.V. Club, 2011-06What it proves: That the pairing matrix was a literal writers-room tool: names on a board with criss-crossed lines, used to find underused combinations. It does not identify any NewsRadio episode as a source.
  3. Taylor Swift on planning Easter eggs years ahead, The Tonight Show, 2021-11What it proves: That Swift describes long-horizon clue planning as deliberate method, including wondering whether she could plant a clue three years ahead. It does not confirm any particular decoded reading.
  4. Taylor Swift on the accidental “Woodvale” clue, Jimmy Kimmel Live, 2020-12What it proves: That Swift distinguishes real clues from accidents, and that “Woodvale” specifically was not one. It is the documented false positive that keeps the method honest.
  5. Taylor Swift explains her Easter eggs, Entertainment Weekly, 2019-05What it proves: That Swift describes clues moving across lyric formatting, clothing, jewellery, manicures, set design, videos and interviews, and says some may stay undiscovered for years.
  6. Mattachine Society, “The Hairpin Drop Heard Around the World”, American Historical Association / archival description, 1969-07What it proves: That “dropping hairpins” was documented mid-twentieth-century slang for signalling homosexuality, and that the Mattachine Stonewall account carried that title. It says nothing about Swift.

Internal research documents

These are ours. They are listed with the same discipline as any other source, including a statement that they prove nothing on their own, and each links out to the primary material underneath so a reader can keep going rather than looping back to us.

  1. Community ↔ NewsRadio Trope, Concept & Dialogue Index, Project research (Google Sheets), 2026-09-22What it proves: Nothing on its own. It is the project's row-level index of mechanisms, each row carrying its own evidence status.
  2. Community Guest Star & Production Lineage Index, Project research (Google Sheets), 2026-09-18What it proves: Nothing on its own. It records casting and personnel facts, each with its own strength label.
  3. Community Show Bible, Project research (Google Docs), 2026-09-22What it proves: Nothing on its own. It is the canonical statement of the project's evidence standard and its episode dossiers.
  4. Community ↔ NewsRadio — Meta-Reference & Lineage Map, Project research (Google Docs), 2026-09-22What it proves: Nothing on its own. It states the amalgamation model and ranks the strongest exhibits.
  5. Taylor Swift — Hairpinning, Multivalent Writing, and Audience Decoding, Project research (Google Docs), 2026-09-22What it proves: Nothing on its own. It is the cross-media case study and states its own evidentiary boundary around private biography.
  6. Community, NewsRadio and Saved by the Bell scripts and indexes, Project script corpus, 2026-09-19What it proves: That a given wording appears in a given episode's transcript. It does not prove who said it unless the line is speaker-attested.