You feel a little weird, as a writer of scripted television for many years, to say you're a fan of reality TV. You feel like a traitor. But I am a total fan.

I still think of Heaven as a liberal-arts school.

You feel a little weird, as a writer of scripted television for many years, to say you're a fan of reality TV. You feel like a traitor. But I am a total fan.

I find as a viewer, when I go to see comedies, the strain to be funny throughout the whole thing. I start to lose my sense of reality, and it ends up feeling like an empty experience; there's funny stuff in it but I've lost the emotional connection to the characters because it's just so bananas.

I feel like I know how to write plot.

I think living in our culture right now, there's a universal experience where we feel like we become what we do. Sometimes that's rewarding and sometimes that creates an existential crisis.

I started out writing when I was young; stuff about exposing the truth about how people are not what they appear, about how they are much more dysfunctional than they seem. Pulling back the curtain - that felt smart. But as I got older, exposing how frail people can be seems less and less deep.