Originally, with all the shows, we went looking for belly laughs.

We had two African American writers [Eric Monte and Michael Evans] on the show ['Good Times'] that knew Cabrini Green inside and out, and that's why we set it there.

But you know, my dad called me the laziest white kid he ever met. When I screamed back at him that he was putting down a race of people to call me lazy, his answer was that's not what he was doing, and that I was also the dumbest white kid he ever met.

When I got married for the third time, and I had children from my other marriage there, that's what I said when it came time in the ceremony for me to say something. I said, "I'm grateful to everybody that participated, everybody that participated in my life that got me to this moment. And everything was dead-right because everything is right now."

So we gravitated to shows and issues and causes that made people care.

In the area we're discussing, leadership begins on Madison Avenue, on the desks and in the offices of people who spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying what will get them ratings.

It crossed our minds early on that the more an audience cared - we were working before, on average, 240, live people. If you could get them caring - the more they cared, the harder they laughed.