I don't want to go back to sitcoms - I'm a middle-aged, white guy - the high school principal who's a buffoon. It's hard enough raising kids now a days, and I don't want to be a part of a show that I'll be embarrassed watching shows like that with my kids and my mother. A lot of shows feel they need to get that for humor. You've have to have had a life experience; otherwise, it's toilet humor. If you've had a job before or experienced something, you get it. Some of these people haven't and they look for the cheap laugh.

On my visits back home, if they saw that I was getting a big head, they'd let me know right away.

A farce, or slapstick humor, does well universally.

I'm concerned about the insidious influence of the media's bad messages that undermine the lessons parents try to instill in their sons and daughters.

It was the last generation of writers [ the Cheers] that had grown up reading books instead of watching TV. So you weren't getting anything that was derivative of I Love Lucy or Happy Days. You were getting real characters [like those] they read in P.G. Wodehouse or Dickens or somewhere along the line, because they had all grown up with a love of literature.

In L.A., though, people get off busses calling themselves actors, so many are really not professionals.

I wrote another wrestling film script. And we finished the shooting [with Lloyd Phillips]. But Henry Winkler came out with his own wrestling film, which did poorly. So the studios passed on ours, and it never got released.