And then, what I hope will happen at the end is that there will be a big enough springboard that, if we chose to go for a second season, we would have one. But, there will be none of those maddening teases that we're going to tell you the answers and then we don't tell you the answers. That gave NBC the idea of making it a mini-series.

I'm not saying that I'm the grand genius that came in on a float and made it happen, but they liked my pitch. I was on my way to a camping trip with my daughter when my agent called and said, "This thing came up and it's really wild and crazy, do you want to read it?" And, I said, "Yeah, why don't you just send it to me? But, I'm going on this camping trip, so I probably won't be able to read it until I get back."

There's been a lot of comparisons to "The Prisoner," and sometimes people take a negative tact on that, but to be really honest, I count that as a compliment, in the sense that what I felt "The Prisoner" was for the '60's, in how the individual triumphs over the state and authority, our show is really about how complacent we have become in our lives, which are scrutinized.

I've always been a sci-fi geek, and I've always loved it. It's my favorite genre of all. The irony of ironies is that, in my early career, I just really never worked in it. "Star Trek" was very interested in me, partially because I did "From the Earth to the Moon," and I was really interested in them, but the timing just never worked out.

I think that was in the discussions when NBC finally bought it and was trying to figure out how to distinguish it as an event. I'll be honest, we did shoot it with the idea of it being an on-going series, but because I am insane when I get to the end of a season and they give you a big, giant cliff-hanger with no answers, I insisted that we provide all the answers to the questions that we set up, at the beginning.

Yes, there's a lot of crazy stuff going on there, but it still comes down to those seven people. What are they going to do? How are they going to deal with everything?

I ended up working on "Chicago Hope" and other things, but always with the idea that, eventually, I would want to take what I'd learned in character drama and try to apply that to the genre that I love, which is science fiction and "The Twilight Zone" type mysteries.