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.

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.

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?

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.

Only in Southern California do camping grounds actually have wifi, so I was sitting in my tent and I started reading it on my computer, and I couldn't put it down. More importantly, I kept getting up in the middle of the night going, Oh, this is cool, so I pitched them an idea that they seemed to like.

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 you're working on a television show with actors, what you hope you're doing is playing jazz with them all the time. You see what they're giving you, so you try to write back to that, and then they play with that, and you get a sense of what is going on. That's just a natural way in which TV series usually work.

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.

What we're really trying to tell, even though it's very much a genre show, is a very human story. Even in this heightened situation, it still comes down to people being people, and dealing with people as people. It really is about the seven people in that town.

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.

There's little things like that, that we paid a lot of attention to. We don't always know how to bond together to get help or to do something, and our attempts are often awkward, selfish or weird. We talked a lot about how to open things up.

And, there's clearly not going to be any outside help coming, anytime soon. These people are going to have to figure out some way to get out of this situation, and they're going to choose all sorts of crazy-ass strategies.