For storytelling purposes, there has to be conflict, but that doesn't mean the people have to be mean. I've never liked mean-spirited comedy.

I stopped using Twitter for a while just because I got sick of it and I started using it again, but I don't check the "mentions."

A million years ago, when doing research about the world of municipal government, one thing that struck me is how often people's job titles changed - from one department to another, from the public to the private sector and back again. People move around a lot, everyone has her eye on some other, slightly better situation in some other corner of city hall. Plus governments are constantly shuffling and reorganizing and shuttering or condensing departments - they are often byzantine hodge-podges of fractured org charts lying atop a bed of shifting sand.

My favorite sitcom of all time is 'Cheers.' That's a perfect example of how, like, people made fun of Cliff, but you never got the sense that they didn't like Cliff.

My main qualm about TV criticism has been when people review TV the way they review movies. They watch the pilot, and write a definitive review of the show. The obvious analogy is that you don't read the first eight pages of a book and then talk about whether the book works or not. People want so desperately in this day and age to declare something thumbs-up or thumbs-down that they declare it immediately.

Every city, every town, every region in USA has these weird things - the way they pronounce words, or what they call soda, or how people drive. It's a huge country, and there's all these strange pockets of behavioral patterns that social anthropologists could spend lifetimes researching and reporting on.

Sometimes you've got to just commit to the idea and press forward and trust that you made the right decision.