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.

I'm not saying that I'm the grand genius that came in on a float and made it happen, but they liked my pitch. I was on my way to a camping trip with my daughter when my agent called and said, "This thing came up and it's really wild and crazy, do you want to read it?" And, I said, "Yeah, why don't you just send it to me? But, I'm going on this camping trip, so I probably won't be able to read it until I get back."

And then, what I hope will happen at the end is that there will be a big enough springboard that, if we chose to go for a second season, we would have one. But, there will be none of those maddening teases that we're going to tell you the answers and then we don't tell you the answers. That gave NBC the idea of making it a mini-series.

Suddenly, I realized how tough trying to structure a story like this is. It was a lot of work. The one big advantage that we had was that we had eight scripts written before we started shooting, or even started casting. We had a really good opportunity to look at it and figure out where we were going to go and how to do it. Once we got a cast, which I love, then we started doing some revisions to make sure that they fit into it.

I feel confident that it will always keep everybody guessing, and yet not in that weird, maddening way where it's like, "Oh, come on, guys!" I think you will be freaked out by the end. I really do. I don't think you'll see it coming at all.

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.

Casting is really weird. Honestly, when Alan Ruck's name came up - and I've worked with Alan before - I went, "Yes, he's perfect." He came in and read for us, which was really sweet of him because he didn't have to, and he nailed it in seconds. We knew exactly who we had. That stuff is really good and fun.