There's been a lot of comparisons to "The Prisoner," and sometimes people take a negative tact on that, but to be really honest, I count that as a compliment, in the sense that what I felt "The Prisoner" was for the '60's, in how the individual triumphs over the state and authority, our show is really about how complacent we have become in our lives, which are scrutinized.

And, what we've allowed ourselves to become - and this is part of Chris' ideas - is complacent, in allowing our lives to be taken over, or at least in allowing that kind of scrutiny into our lives. We've given up a little bit of that, and this is the existential nightmare of all of that. What happens when you suddenly find out that people have been watching you, with a purpose?

Yes, there's a lot of crazy stuff going on there, but it still comes down to those seven people. What are they going to do? How are they going to deal with everything?

Hardly anybody thinks about typing in their social security number as ID. Hardly anybody pays attention to the myriad of security cameras. There isn't anybody that worked on this show that doesn't look at security cameras differently than when they started.

When we finally had a cast and could see what they could do, here was an opportunity to go back and modify things. We didn't actually do that much modifying, but we did enough to make it feel as if they fit in their own skin, and we got a lot of good input from them. They're a terrific cast. They worked really hard.

It was tough to write. We had the shadow of "Lost" hanging around and I just kept saying, "Guys, we need to take a really wide birth around 'Lost.' We're going to get lots of comparisons anyway, but we need to prove, within a couple episodes, that it's not 'Lost.'"

I ended up working on "Chicago Hope" and other things, but always with the idea that, eventually, I would want to take what I'd learned in character drama and try to apply that to the genre that I love, which is science fiction and "The Twilight Zone" type mysteries.