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.

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.

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.

What we're going for, in those humorous moments, is the absurdity of it all. The craziness of the night manager offering them an umbrella in the height of what is a horrible disaster was like, "What?!" That's Andy Greenfield, and he nailed the audition. He's the sweetest guy in the world, as is often the case with those guys, but on camera, he's so creepy that a lot of us kept saying, "You know, Andy, don't look at us like that anymore, okay? You're scaring us."

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 think that was in the discussions when NBC finally bought it and was trying to figure out how to distinguish it as an event. I'll be honest, we did shoot it with the idea of it being an on-going series, but because I am insane when I get to the end of a season and they give you a big, giant cliff-hanger with no answers, I insisted that we provide all the answers to the questions that we set up, at the beginning.

What we were trying very hard to do, just in the way we shot it, was to make it feel as if we're in that environment ourselves, just so we can get a grasp on what it is. A lot of our influence was about getting stuck on a level on any of those video games, where you find yourself caught and you can't get out, and it's maddening. We talked a lot about that.