It's so much easier to write for an actor than for an imaginary character and then try to fit that character to an actor. It doesn't work very often in my experience.

The news is a public service. It's a way to inform people of what's going on in their world. And when you make it about ratings and make it about ad dollars, there's no incentive to inform people. The incentive is to be sensationalistic and get as many people to watch as you can without any regard for truth or objectivity.

I find Billy Eichner to be hilarious, though I also imagine that for many, a little goes a long way. Billy provides a kind of comedy the Parks and Recreations show did not have - an insane person screaming at everyone, and our job going forward, as it is with all of our characters, is to develop him and make him more three dimensional.

With mockumentaries, the conceit is that the characters are being interviewed, so you can start a scene and cut to a character looking at the camera and saying, "I'm working on this project," instead of having to figure out ways for people to talk naturally about what they're doing. You see this problem in pilots - people end up explaining things to each other that they'd never explain in real life.

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.

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.

You should be nice to people because it's better to be nice to people than mean to people, not because you think there's something in it for you.