In high school, my friend and I discovered that your cable-access station had to let you do whatever you wanted - it was like the Wild West. We made a couple weird things, like a tribute to the Zucker brothers, where we had a panel discussion about the Naked Gun movies. We wrote a script and made jokes that I'm sure were terrible and showed clips of The Naked Gun without permission.

Rule number one for the writers when we committed to the jump was: no hoverboards. No one is allowed to pitch that everyone is on hoverboards. It's going to be very very gently sci-fi.

People do things with terrible motivations and those motivations are selfish and self-interested and financially driven.

Mockumentary formats are great for a couple of things. One of them is delivering the toughest part of any sitcom episode, what writers call "pipe" - the nuts and bolts of the story where you explain what's happening, the boring plot stuff.

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.

What's important on a comedy show, or any show, is that some stories have to go somewhere. There have to be ends to the beginnings and middles you create. But sometimes it's like a way station on the highway, then the actual thing doesn't have to be this giant, climactic, life-changing, game-changing thing.

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.