You really don't settle on an idea until you're really sure it's the best idea. Then once you settle on it you commit to it entirely. That was always the plan.

The best shows are always the ones that are very, very low-concept and just about great characters.

Society is completely unreasonable. People want everything and want to pay for nothing. They panic if they think about their taxes being raised, but if their garbage collection is a day late they scream and yell.

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.

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

I think that that the main problem with a lot of social media stuff in terms of ratings is it's a very skewed motivation.

I care more about making sure the story is correct and the characters are behaving in character than I do about the individual jokes.