When we make jokes about being lazy, or things that look like we're lazy parents, we don't want to make it appear like we're not also incredibly hardworking people when it comes to striving at our vocational things. I do think it's a conversation, but a lot of times, you make sacrifices for the sake of jokes, or for the sake of a scene.

Working on 'Raising Hope' is a very hurry-up-and-wait activity, and I just always liked the idea of being as productive as I can be. I write because I don't just want that time to dissolve, where I'm sitting in a trailer staring blankly at the paintings of moccasins that came with the trailer.

I rarely accept things on blind faith, especially the orthodoxy of any given practice, or any given practicum. I'm like, "Oh come on. Is this the way to do things?"

There's sort of a very symbiotic thing that happens on good TV shows with great writers, which is that they start to sort of embrace who the actors are and try to make the roles more specific to what they bring and what they can do.

I'm a big John Steinbeck fan. Cormac McCarthy. I've always loved the stories of regular people. Mark Twain, too. When you look back at some of the epic writers of our country's history, very rarely do you find upper-class royalty. We seem to delve into the struggle of life and the labor of life much more frequently.

There is a somewhat-surprising, somewhat totally predictable paucity of struggle in entertainment television. I do like being a part of a show featuring a family from a struggling socioeconomic strata.

I like the idea of building this wandering, epic narrative in a form that people don't expect epic narratives to appear.