The beauty behind killing someone who no one thinks you're willing to kill is, of course, that you throw people out of their comfort zone. And that's good because you want people to be on the edge of their seats.

I actually started in the opposite place. I come from a technical background - I'm a mathematician and a programmer by trade - and I was one of those people who would watch a show and say, "Oh, that could never happen."

The rule, I think, is: Do your homework, learn what there is to learn about the real world, and then when you get in the room, forget it all.

As far as how important the real-life resonance of the stories is, I think it must play at least a small role in the show's success, because it gives the show this sense of suspense from the fact that it seems at least plausible.

Ultimately people don't watch shows because of how realistic they are. They watch them because of the same dramatic elements that have always made stories interesting. And fundamentally if those elements don't work, no amount of reality is going to be enough to keep people watching a show.

What happens is that as the scripts are rewritten and re-edited in order to make the story more compelling, you sometimes end up with what you could call a time singularity - where there's no way for everything that happens to happen in real time. It's something that you need to wink at.

You know, it's hard as a writer to lose characters (and actors) you like. You really don't want them to die because you're not going to get to see them anymore.