Burn Notice, "Devil You Know": Post-morteming season three with Matt Nix

As we come to the end of "Burn Notice" season three, I thought in lieu of a review of what I felt was a strong episode with a couple of smartly-chosen guest stars, I'd talk to the show's creator, Matt Nix, about the ins and outs of a season that began airing all the way back in early June of '09. Matt's thoughts (and, of course, spoilers for season three, plus one question at the very end that discusses some of the direction for season four in the vaguest of terms, and which will get its own spoiler warning) coming up just as soon as I meet you at the emergency-emergency spot...

So we ended last season with Michael jumping out of Management's helicopter, free from his control but also from his protection. What was your plan going into this year, and how, if at all, did it change?

We wanted to explore what was Michael's life like if he wasn't under the thumb of the folks that burned him. That fell into two categories. One is the people that were interested in getting to him, who might have been reluctant to do so before, which is something we did some of, notably in episode 301, "Friends and Family." And then, when presented with a situation where he was still burned but not where he had people working actively against him, what efforts would Michael make to get his job back and his life back, and what challenges would he face there?

One thing that evolved for us over the course of the season is that we didn't want to get into a series of repetitive, And here's another person from Michael's past coming to get him! And here's another one! And another! That can seem appealing when you're thinking about it, and we've done that over the course of the seasons, but ultimately, there are only so many ways to skin that particular cat. And one of the things we're conscious of is having people show up just wanting to kill Michael - well, it's not that hard to kill a guy, even a trained guy, if you set your mind to it. So it has to be about asking "To whom is Michael useful, and what uses do they want to put him to?" Part of the Strickler character came from that; it might not have been the hell that people were expecting, but it is something that people in that position do have to deal with.

In season two, there were essentially two big adversaries: Carla and Victor. Here, we had Detective Paxson, and then Diego, and Strickler, and Gilroy, and, in the finale, Simon. Why did you decide to pit Michael against so many ongoing people? Was it a matter of just trying to find the right fit, or was there a specific plan that required all of them?

We felt like we were on the hook for cops. It's a question that had come up. People will sometimes say, "Why haven't the cops come after Michael?" - as if it's something we'd never thought of. We wanted to address that the cops hadn't come before because he was disappearing from police computers, so what would happen if there was suddenly a cop who noticed him? So that was one thing. And then, of course you are right to mention Michael's CIA contact (Diego), but he wasn't really an adversary. He was someone Michael was cultivating. He wasn't a season-long adversary. Paxson was a straight-up adversary. That was interesting, but it's not really a show that lives in the realm of the police force. Strickler was really kind of our first cooperative "Burn Notice" seasonal adversary. He's kind of Michael's friend. He was working with him specifically. There's reason to believe that he might not be a good guy, but he's not at odds with Michael. And Gilroy, the big thing we were exploring was Michael's sense that some things are worth pursuing whether or not somebody's making you do it. It's not like anybody came to Michael and said, 'Go after this guy.' It was more like Gilroy was around, and Michael felt he had to go after him, and he did. And Simon was just our opportunity to bring a season-long arc that didn't have a lot to do with Michael's ongoing mystery and bring it back around in a new way. Answering a question that I think is a really interesting question, but that people maybe hadn't asked, which is, "If Michael didn't do all thsoe things in his file, who did?"

Well, why would Simon be so upset that Michael had been given credit for his deeds? Once he was broken out of prison, wouldn't he be pleased that he was no longer being accused of this stuff?

The truth is that if you look at the history - not that we expect people to watch "Burn Notice" with a compendium of recent history - but that grew out of reading up on folks like Abu Nidal. The true international terror types are in the business of building themselves a little dossier, cultivating a particular reputation. And they do steal things from each other. It is actually useful for one international bad guy to borrow the jacket of another intl bad guy. There are a few kind of superstars of that genre. Carlos the Jackal did not do all the things Carlos the Jackal was credited with. He found he could make more money by having a great reputation and threatening to hijack planes than hijacking planes.

So in the end, was Gilroy working for anybody, or had he just been hired directly by Simon?

You'll have to watch season four.

I ask because fans were asking for a while why Michael didn't just put a bullet in Gilroy's head, and then last week Michael explained that he was worried Gilroy might be working for someone else. But we get to the end of this episode, and it seems as if there wasn't anyone else in the picture.

It turns out in season four, he's not Simon's only friend in Miami. As season four progresses, we find out, yes, Simon had other friends. It makes sense. Simon didn't get off the plane and then find a cache of explosives.

In the back half of this season, Michael seemed to really be embracing his new life as a vigilante who helps people from week to week, even as he was going after Gilroy. Do you see a point at which the show can exist without the mythology about the burn notice and the arcs with various spy types? Could it work as just a detective show where stuff blows up, or does the series need the arcs?

I don't really anticipate a point at which, to speak in mechanical show terms, we just do A-stories. The show is sort of built around the idea that Michael participates in helping people in Miami while at the same time operating in a larger context, albeit in a sort of clipped wings fashion. In season 20 of "Burn Notice," when everyone is riding around on their motorized scooters and shooting their laser guns at each other, do I think that Michael will be engaged in year 20 of dealing with the folks that burned him? No. But I think in year 20, will he be engaged with a larger overall intelligence world in some way? Yes.

And another thing. I guess this is not really the way you're supposed to answer these questions as a show creator, but it's the truth: We are really in kind of an unusual situation vis-a-vis serialized stories. It isn't a serialized show - we don't want people to feel like if you missed last week's show you shouldn't watch this week's - but at the same time we want to create something that's rewarding for people who watch each week. We don't want to do a long "Previously on...," or make it seem like a show that's not friendly to people tuning in in season 4. So we're limited in our serialized stories to things we can explain succinctly at the top of an episode. That's what USA does. We're not on a network that wants a heavily serialized show, so even if I wanted to go in that direction, USA would have strong words with me. We can never be "Lost" or "The Shield," but neither can we ever be just a straight-up episodic show.

I also think it's the way of the world now, that shows get more serialized as they go on. "House" was very self-contained in the beginning, but now has heavy serial elements.

Well, the longer that you're on the air, and the farther you get from Michael having been burned, does it become more challenging to keep coming up with these larger spy arcs?

We're trying to keep things fresh and do different things. As I say, Strickler was, "Let's do a guy Micael's not fighting." And Gilroy was "Let's do a guy that Michael is going to volunteer to fight, and he has to prove himself," and we hadn't done that before. Honestly, the first season was more challenging than anything that came after. Is it maybe more challenging to reproduce the immediacy of season one, like, 'Who burned me a few days ago?' Yes.

Bear in mind we have two (half) seasons, so we're doing at least two, that's kind of the deal. We're going to have some version of a serialized arc for the winter episodes, and some for the summer. So we're doing two of those a year. Do I have my favorites? Are some more successful than others? Absolutely. And that is just to be expected. I don't feel like it's just a law of diminishing returns, because there are different ways of coming at those arcs. Some of them are going to be really fun. that also has to do with the chemistry of actors, how things mix thematically with A-stories. I can't say that it isn't sometimes a challenge, but it's not as simple as, "Michael is going to forever try to figure out who burned him." We haven't searched for the person who burned him in a long time.

So when you have an arc that maybe isn't working as well as you had hoped, what do you do? Do you bail on it early? Or do you have to stick with it for as long as you had planned and hope you can make it work by the end?

I would say, in any show, you just have to adjust on the fly. You make contracts with actors, you don't bail out on something. You don't call the network and say, "I know we have this guy for 12 episodes, but..." I've never wanted to do that. But certainly you find a groove with actors. For any particular arc character, there will be fans who say, 'That was the best one ever!' and others who say, 'Why did you do that one?' But watching the evolution of Michael's relationship with Strickler, that started in one way, and what we found was what we were enjoying about that relationship was Strickler did not seem like a physical threat, did not seem particularly evil. And so what became fun about him was seeing him kind of blandly get his hooks into Michael and then start working it. So seeing him transform from this guy who's kind of smiley to this guy who shuts down Fiona really sharply and makes very reasonable arguments for why Micahel should betray the people he loves, that was really fun with us. But can I say, when we started out, we said, "Let's make him just like this! In episode 4 of his arc, let's make him snap at Fiona. That'll be pretty badass"? No.

I actually really liked Strickler. Michael shooting him to save Fiona was one of the seaosn's high points, but was there ever a moment where you felt you didn't want to lose the character so soon?

My wife and I watched "The Sopranos" together, and she was very clear with me when I started working on "Burn Notice," that as far as she was concerned, what made "The Sopranos" good was, when characters died, they stayed dead. And part of you didn't want it to happen. There's certainly not a network problem or a writer problem, but I would have great marital strife if I ever shied away from kiling characters I like. She's hardcore about it. There were a lot of big Victor fans from season 2, Michael Shanks became a friend over the course of that, I loved him. People asked, "Can't Victor come back to life?" And one time that came up, my wife was like, "If you do that, don't come home."

Speaking of relationships where threats are sometimes involved, you kind of casually had Michael and Fi hook up again a few episodes back, and it hasn't really been mentioned since. Where does their relationship stand at this point?

Bear in mind that "at this point" for me is different from "at this point" for you (because he's working on writing season four). One of the things that they have sort of fallen into is a kind of defacto relationship that does not involve them living together and cooking dinner for each other, and that has its challenges and ups and downs, and may even include them being with other people at certain points. But I think that I have come to think of Michael and Fiona as, essentially, a particular kind of couple, with an extremely unconventional relationship. But let's just call a spade a spade. It's not like they date a lot of other people or can date a lot of other people. That doesn't mean their relationship is always comfortable or easy or even alive. It may be on hold at any particular time. I think that even when Fiona was nominally with Campbell, was she really with Campbell? of course not. She was with Not-Michael.

(MILD SEASON 4 SPOILER WARNING)
At this point for me, we've ended on Michael being taken to a prison that has a really nice drawing room. What do you feel comfortable about saying will happen in season four?

In season four, Michael finds himself in a whole new relationship with the people that burned him that has a whole new set of opportunities and a whole new set of challenges. Michael, Fiona and Sam make a new friend who is both very useful and very complicated. Is that coy enough? I can say next year we're going to see a new character who's going to be helping Michael, Fiona and Sam in their exploits around Miami, but there's a lot of reasons for him to work with them, and when he's working with them he's a great member of that team, but for various reasons, he's not someone they can get entirely comfortable.

Alan Sepinwall may be reached at asepinwall@starledger.com Click here to read the full post

Men of a Certain Age, "Back in the S--t": Talking to Mike Royce

In this morning's column, I spoke with "Men of a Certain Age" co-creator Mike Royce about the genesis of the show, its future prospects, and why people underestimated Ray Romano's acting talents before they saw him on this gem of the show.

In lieu of a review of the first season finale - which I felt went for a bit more closure than the show usually likes to deal with, but which Royce argues below may not be as neat and tidy as it seems - after the jump I have a full transcript of our interview. Feel free to talk about it, or the finale (the guys on their walk was the season highlight for Scott Bakula), or the season in general.

The transcript coming up just as soon as I Google the word "happy"...

(We began our conversation with Royce mentioning that he had listened to the "MoaCA" segment of last week's Firewall & Iceberg podcast.)

Your compatriot was remarking that it should be a 30-minute HBO show, and that's exactly how it started. It was a long development. We started writing it ourselves, and then HBO made a deal, and then it got caught up in all the (executive) transition there. They passed on it but were nice enough to let us shop it around. Once we were going to do that and we realized we'd be going to basic cable, there would be commercials, we realized we had a 40-minute pilot, so we asked ourselves, "Are we going to go back to 22-minutes? Really?" I think what actaully gets in people's way is not that it's too thin, but that the commercials are a pain in everybody's ass. For this show in particular, we don't have a lot of cliffhanger act breaks.

This is not exactly "The Shield" in that respect.

No.

So while we're on the subject of the show's development, how did it start? Were you and Ray looking to do a project together, or was this like the "Raymond" writers room where you were talking about your lives and then the story idea came.

The last one, basically. We started getting together becaue I was waiting for "Lucky Louie" to get picked up, and he was in between stuff. We got together to write a movie or something, and as we got together, we were both at this point in our lives, all we started talking about was this. All this stuff in our heads about where we were at this phase we seem to be going through. It came out in a bunch of personal stories, stories of other people's lives. Raymond was really taking stories from our lives, and working from there. This just felt natural to say, "Let's do something with this. If you see this in movies or on television, it's usually in a cartoony way."

Well, then can you talk about how you've worked to try to deal with this subject in a non-cartoony way while working in some humor?

When we wrote the pilot, we were allergic to trying to do anything that felt in any way like we were pushing the comedy, and we were trying very hard to make sure every moment felt real - I hate that, it's sort of a weird word - but we didn't want these to be goofy characters. We erred on the side of not-funny in writing the pilot, and what we found out in the shooting of it was that we could be funny. We got more comfortable with our style of what could be funny. When the guys banter, we never want it to feel like they're bantering, we wanted to get their voices better and also real. Even the possum thing in the pilot went from being a huge part, which may somehow make its way to the DVD. We had, like, 15 minutes. In the original pilot that we wrote - to TNT's credit, they asked us to shoot an alternate to this - the possum crawls off and goes into the woods and they walk into the woods to look for it because Joe can't let it go. They find it's wounded and not dead and they have this whole thing where they can't decide what to do, and they get their courage up to put it out of its misery, but then they leave it there. We found we were caught between two basic horrible situations: killing something on screen like that didn't feel right, but neither did walking away from a dying thing. It never struck the tone we were going for. It's funny, it's blackly humorous. The reason we cut so much out is that it didn't come across the way we thought in the writing.

So was there a point in the writing of the early episodes where you felt like you really captured the tone you were going for?

One thing we were very pleased in was the diner scene in the pilot where they're talking about Sisyphus. We told them to loosen up, don't depart too much from the script, but they could go off on tangents and make it feel conversational. We did two takes that way, and if you look at the word-for-word thing, it's pretty much what's in the script, but now it's, "I believe they're freinds." It's not, "I'm delivering the single guy point of view" and "I deliver the married guy's point of view," even though that's what they're doing. That style we've maintained, we're not like "Friday Night Lights" where they throw out the script sometimes, and that's brilliant. We don't go quite that far, but we're not, "It says 'the' here, and you said 'a.'" These three characters are really archetypes, and wanted to use that and not make them feel like stereotypes. That approach has made all the humor feel like we're not pushing it. People are expecting a different kind of show, it's not going to be a laugh riot, though the date show had more humorous moments than most. That was a good indication of how far we can take things.

Years ago, I visited with you and the other "Raymond" writers for a feature story, and Lew (Schneider, who's also a writer here) talked about how Ray Romano is much more neurotic than Ray Barone. Is that where Joe's anxiety came from?

In way that's true. But that's also us overstating things to be funny to you. (Ray) is definitely a dog with a bone when it comes to certain obsessions and neuroses. He'll say he's very neurotic and I guess technically he is, but he's not "Bored to Death" or Woody Allen. He's not a walking mass of tics, but he can get a thought in his head and have a very hard time getting it out. We've had a very good time with that on the show and will continue to do so.

Well, I knew from watching a lot of "Raymond" that Ray could be a very good actor when called on to do so, but one of the most frequent reactions I get when I write about this show is, "I can't believe that he's this good."

I think he unfairly gets put in the category of stand-ups who did sitcoms. Seinfeld never gave a s--t if he was a good actor. I don't want to say he didn't try, but he owned the fact that he was a little stiff and wasn't going to try to do things. I think Ray somehow gets lumped in with him. A large part of what made "Raymond" work was the way he would take lines and be a little off-kilter with them. In a four-camera sitcom, that's a little hard to tell, it feels like verybody's shouting. But within the context of other four-camera sitcoms, especially back in 1996, why "Raymond" premiered, there was a subtlety there that he brought to it.

I had an unfair advantage. We all knew, anybody who worked on "Raymond" knew he had that capability, but I had an even earlier experience. When we were both stand-ups in New York, I went to see him in an acting class, and he did a hybrid scene where he started out doing stand-up and talked about this thing that went into the pilot of "Raymond" about his father cracking the code to his answering machine and listening to the messages. And then he started talking about it in a more personal way. It was frustrating him, and his wife was upset, and he wanted to tell his father off. He wished his father was there right now, and he turned the chair around like he was talking to his father. He did this whole thing like he was talking to his father, and it was like, 'Whoa.' It was so heartfelt. I always had that in the back of my head. He is a really good actor. So it was less of a surprise to me.

But given everyone's expectations of who Ray is as a performer, was there ever any pressure, either when you were at HBO or here with TNT, to go in a broader comic direction because that's what people wanted from him?

We never really got that, and that's to TNT's credit. We came to them with the thing written, and other than the possum thing, they never got on us to change it. Once it was shot and they were deicding whether to pick it up, they came to us saying, "People are telling us this is a little bleak." They wanted to know the direction of the show. We always felt the pilot was bleak - albeit not as bleak as other people thought it was - but we wanted the pilot to put people in (the characters') mode. In any case, I think they just wanted to mae sure they weren't going to start dying off. I think we wanted to reassure them that this whole series is two steps forward, one step back. There will be all these moments of hope, and plenty of moments of bleakness, too

Well, it feels like in the finale the guys all take several steps forward. Like I said on the podcast, it felt a little like you and Ray had written a series finale just to hedge your bets in case you weren't renewed.

There was that aspect of, "If this is the last episode, we want it to have at least something to it, some sort of closure." But at the same time, we were setting things up for the second season. That's the way we viewed it as well.

The other thing is, we felt like these last two episodes were paying off a lot of stuff we'd been settign up. They're more plotty than we usually do - at a certain point things need to happen. So we just felt like those were the things that needed to happen after the stories we'd told so far. The situation between Owen and his father, there will never be a circumstance where they don't see each other. Doesn't mean he won't leave the dealership again; he's going to be working for his father now in a much worse capacity than ever. Terry's whole situation is going to be very fluid. Terry is somebody who's obviously searching. We've got a lot of interesting ideas about where he goes from here and whether acting is a part of that or not. And then Joe, with his gambling situation, we felt like that needed to come to a close right now. Next season is a whole different - anything you saw there, there's plenty of room there for many things to happen.

In terms of Joe and the gambling, Manfro reaches out that he wants to be friends even though Joe's allegedly quit. And while I don't want to lose Manfro, that seems like a situation that'd be very fraught for Joe.

We're thinking that's a good thing. We have a lot of ideas around that, too. But when I say, "a lot," they're pretty disparate. Part of what's interesting, Manfro we really enjoyed that character. We certainly, if possible, want to see him again, but we want it to be believable.

I like how you played things down the middle with Manfro, in that he likes Joe, but only to a point, and not to a point where he'd ever let Joe off the hook on a debt.

Manfro is his own lonely hearts. In Joe, he has a friend that he doesn't have in any of his other clients. He has a guy to whom he feels a weird kinship, and Joe feels the same way about Manfro. Even in a way he doesn't connect with his friends, he connects with Manfro, he tells Manfro certain things that he doesn't tell Owen and Terry. It's an odd relationship

In the finale, we see Owen kicking ass and taking names at the rival dealership, and his father suggests it's just Owen succeeding through spite. It's been unclear throughout the season whether Owen is a bad salesman just because he's lazy, or because being under his father's thumb all these years has made him that way. How do you see it?

I would say all of those things. There's a moment with Owen we had to cut from the pilot, and I miss it. When he's selling the two old people who are complaining and Marcus comes over and takes over the sale - where that scene started in the original cut, it's just him daydreaming and the old people are talking and he doesn't quite tune in for a few seconds. For the same reason that we had him falling asleep at his desk. It's that he's been at this job for a long time and it isn't his dream job. He doesn't hate it so much, but it's not where he thought he'd be. The only thing keeping him there is that, "Some day, I'm going to be the boss." He doesn't have a fire for that particular job. Hopefully, what we covered in the finale, all those things are true. He has the ability, but he was being lazy. So his father's totally right, a lot of people said after the pilot, 'He's a lazy f--k.' His father's right, but also Owen's right.

And Andre is an actor who doesn't have a lot of vanity. He's there with his shirt off whenever and wherever you need him to be.

I have to hand it to him. He came in raring to go in the pilot. When we filmed the bedroom scene, he said, "I should be in my tightie-whities." The truth is, when he was first mentioned to us, we just said, 'No.' The notion of Andre Braugher was this commading presece, but when we met him, I'm saying it nicely, he'd filled out a lot. And if he wants to do it, you can't deny, acting-wise, that he can do it. The combination of those two things made us go okay. Who are we to say no to this guy? He proposed doing that, we wanted him doing that. We wanted to make sure, in a way, it really worked in the show. (The audience) would see a guy they knew as being thinner and younger being a little bit heavier and older. And in the "Mind's Eye" show where he's sitting there naked for a long time, we said, "We kind of need you with your shirt off here, because we have a bunch of fat guy jokes coming up." He said sure. After it aired, he was watching the show with his wife, and she said, "That's a lot of man." Since then, he has lost a lot of weight.

Well, you introduced that storyline earlier this season where Owen resolves to eat better. And I've interviewed Braugher over meals in the past, and he ate as badly as I do. So how do you deal with him either not losing weight if you had a story where Owen's getting thinner, or if Andre really does take a lot of weight off when you weren't planning for that?

I don't think we're at the point yet where we would ask him to lose weight, and I also don't think we're at the point where he's going to come in forty pounds lighter or heavier. We just picture the character the way he eats in real life. He's always going to have those urges, there's always going to be temptation, and he's not necessarily going to be disciplined about it. Owen promised his son, but there's going to be some stumbles. When we got picked up, I called him and he was doing Shakespeare in the Park, he was walking through Central Park. He said, "Great, great. I gotta go. I just want to let you know: I'm staying fat, and I'm staying funny."

With him, it's sort of the opposite of Ray, where people don't think of him as someone who's funny, but when "Homicide" asked him to deliver a joke, he could do it well.

When we had people in reading, and he was nice enough to read also, we had a lot of really funny guys, and good actors, but it just never felt like they were really friends. He didn't go for the joke at all, but it felt real and the moments that were scripted to be funny, he made funny. He's really become quite the comedy savant.

And Scott has his feet in both worlds, since he's done a lot of comedy and drama.

And I have to give him a lot of credit, too. I think he was somewhat underserved in the first few episodes, and his stories got a lot more intersting as they went along. We cut a couple of very good scenes for him from the pilot. He took a leap of faith with us, that we were going to cut these great scenes for the good of the series, and he has really delivered, when he 's supposed to be funny and supposed to be dramatic. He made it really something real, I love that scene in the second episode where he confronts the guy in the doorway about almost running him over, and he's "What am I doing here?'"

And he worked well with Carla Gallo.

She was great, and she really did a great job in the whole series. That's another person where, in the beginning, there wasn't much there for her to do, and I really liked their relationship as it went along. I think it became very sincere and not a cliche of older guy/younger woman.

After last week's episode ended with her mad at him about the surfing thing, I said it was his fault for not acknowledging that he missed the lesson, but a lot of my readers felt that since she was the one who pushed him to do the movie, she had no right to be mad.

We had some discussion, but we ultimately fell where you were. But we had done a whole show about her telling him, "If we're going to be together…" and she calls him on the carpet about being on time. This was a bigger line that he was taking on himself: he tells her, "No, I'm going to do it," and she tells him don't do it unless you're going to, and he insists on it, and then forgets about it. Who knows if we're going to see her again? This could be temporary. It's final for right now. He made such a big deal of, "I'm announcing that we are taking this relationship to the next level," he pulls her close, he plunged in. And then, suddenly, it's like nothing happened. He's distracted, has a lot going on, and she, I think, just wished there was some acknowledgment. If he had just said, 'Oh, god, the surfing!," she would have been fine with it.

So how do you maintain a show where the stories and the stakes are deliberately so small?

This is just not going to be one of these shows that goes for 10 years, whether the ratings hold up or not. I think we view the show like they're in this phase of life. It began with the pilot, and the series finale is going to be when they get to some other side with it. Midlife is like this weird second teenager-hood where your brain is operating on levels you're not familiar with, you're making some bad decisions and changing your life in ways that maybe isn't wise. Things, at a certain point, settle down from that. We think that's the arc of the series. I don't think that's going to take 200 episodes.

But given that you don't do big cliffhanger act breaks and there aren't a ton of promotable moments, was TNT ever worried about the commercial viability of it?

The reviews have been pretty good, and that reassured them. It's also the first show that they have produced as a studio. So I think they're kind of proud of it, they're certainly not shy about giving us notes. I have to give them a huge amount of credit. They never made us do anything. They will give us notes but always defer to us, and I know that is not the case on many other programs.

Alan Sepinwall may be reached at asepinwall@starledger.com Click here to read the full post

Chuck: Schwartz and Fedak vs. the controversy

Last night, I wrote that the latest episode of "Chuck" wasn't designed to be a cliffhanger leading into the Olympics, and that there weren't any jaw-dropping, earth-shattering developments that would have fans arguing and angsting for the three weeks until the next episode.

Nearly 300 comments - some of them thoughtful, some of them furious, some of them bizarre - later, all I can say is... whoops.

After the jump, some thoughts on the controversy and then a long conversation with "Chuck" co-creators Josh Schwartz and Chris Fedak about their reaction to the reaction...

So, if you missed it, "Chuck vs. the Mask" ended with Chuck deciding to pursue a relationship with new Nerd Herd co-worker Hannah (guest star Kristin Kreuk), while Sarah responded by showing interest in new spy boss Shaw (guest star Brandon Routh).

Some fans liked the episode and had no problems with the current configuration of the love trapezoid. Some (like Mo Ryan, found some flaws in the episode, and/or don't really see why Chuck and Sarah have yet to hook up, but overall are happy with the season and content to wait for the new episodes in March.

Some, though, were outraged at this latest roadblock in the inevitable Chuck and Sarah pairing, and weren't shy about saying that Schwartz and Fedak had ruined the relationship - if not the series itself - with one going so far as to suggest that all fans boycott watching the show on TV until the ratings get so low that NBC would have to force Schwartz and Fedak to reconfigure the show more to their liking. (Not only is this futile, since, as Schwartz says below, they're already well into writing the season's last episode, but all it would do would be to get the show canceled.)

Now, "Chuck" has a very unique relationship with its fans, who helped save it from cancellation through the whole Subway campaign last spring, so it's understandable that some viewers might feel more proprietary of the show than they would of some other series that they just watched but didn't buy sandwiches for. But as Linda Holmes at NPR wrote, there's a danger in letting fans dictate where the story goes. Schwartz, Fedak and company could, indeed, be taking Chuck and Sarah, or the show in general, to a very bad place, but, "The most satisfying stories almost always involve one development that, when it happened, was not what fans would have voted for."

But because of that connection to the fans, Josh and Chris wanted to get on the phone with me to discuss some of the concerns about last night's show, even though, as Josh notes, "We don't feel we have to defend what we did." So here we go, and I want to remind you once again about the most important part of the commenting rules around here: Be respectful of other commenters. Do not mock, belittle or attack them. Talk about the show, not each other. Any commenter who can't stay calm and follow those guidelines will see their comments deleted, ASAP.

Now then...

Did you guys expect anywhere near this kind of reaction to this episode?

JS: It was not unexpected that people who are into Chuck/Sarah - I refuse to use the word 'shippers,' but you can, I just want my objection to that term duly noted on the record - would be not thrilled with the development. The one thing that we didn't anticipate is that this would be the cliffhanger, and that there would be two more weeks required, three more weeks, until there was resolution to it.

So ordinarily, if this was just one episode with another coming next week, some people wouldn't be quite as upset?

JS: Exactly. Well, they might still be upset, but they'd only be upset for a week instead of three. Not that anything's going to be resolved next (episode), but it would still allow the story to continue.

Well, let's talk about that. I know you don't want to give away where the story's going, but what would you say to the people who feel betrayed, or just outraged, by what happened last night?

JS: We are further along in the story than they are.

CF: From our perspective, this is a necessary part of the season. It's like the middle chapters of a book. For the season to play out, we have to tell this story. Not only the romantic side of things, but also on the spy side of the story, feeding into the mythology of it all.

Some people have been wondering, before last night and after Sarah found out what Chuck said to her in the vault in "Chuck vs. the Three Words," why have they not gotten together? What, in your eyes, is the thing that has prevented that from happening?

JS: First of all, Sarah allowed herself to become vulnerable at the beginning of this season in terms of the Prague thing and was heartbroken by it. I think vulnerability is not something Sarah Walker does easily. Once she made herself emotionally available and was hurt, it's going to be that much harder to make herself available again.

CF: And on the Chuck side of the coin, he's made the decision to be a hero, to be a spy, and that only further divides Sarah and Chuck. As we saw in the Manoosh episode last week, as Chuck becomes more of a spy, Sarah is asking the question, "Is this the guy that I fell for last season?"

JS: I know there's some question, "Why can she date Shaw and not Chuck?" She's still there to protect Chuck. The bodyguard component of that professional relationship remains intact. Shaw is an equal - her boss in fact - and the same issue of Sarah's feelings for Chuck compromising her ability to do the job in the most cold-blooded way possible remains.

CF: There's also the part, too, that Shaw and Sarah share so much in common. They're spies, they speak the same language, have gone through the same spy school. This is the type of guy that Sarah, in any other spy show, would fall in love with.

There's also been a lot of speculation about why she might have gone from being so annoyed with Shaw to being interested in him within this one episode. Some people suggested she went running for a rebound guy when she saw Chuck with Hannah, while others think she might be checking Shaw out because she doesn't fully trust him.

JS: We don't want to answer everything. Some of the fun of being an audience member, I hope, is projecting onto the scenes and reading between the lines. There's such pressure, anyway, on a network show to spell everything out and leave everything completely unambigious, and then that pressure is doubled by fans who want an answer and want it now. And, look, we have been saved by our fans. We will most likely need to be saved by our fans again. We are incredibly invested in and respectful of our fans and their response. We are receptive and read almost everything that's out there. This is a show that we're doing as much for us as we are for them. That being said, we still have to tell the story that we're going to tell.

CF: A lot of the questions that you're asking, we actually address, but we address in upcoming episodes.

Well, in terms of being receptive to the fans versus telling the story you want to tell, is there a danger in just giving the fans what they want?

JS: Absolutely. Having been raised in the slums of the teen drama - just kidding, it's not a slum, it's a beautiful part of the state - those kind of shows, they just exist on the relationships that people are invested in. It's what they drive on week in and week out. As you stated yesterday in your blog, Chuck and Sarah is but an element of our show. There's a lot of other storytelling imperatives that are driving how these episodes unfold. Chuck and Sarah is a critical element of the show - we have said before that it is the heart of the show, and we stand by that - but there are other factors that are driving the story here. Given time, I think you will see this is a story that's unfolding not just on a romantic plane. There's a lot of Chuck and Blair fans on the "Gossip Girl" sites who've heard that couple's in trouble and are up in arms in a similar way, and it's like, if people are only happy, there is no conflict, therefore there is no storytelling, or drama. We're not arbitrary about it, we don't do it to drive conflict, We're not just going, "How do we keep them apart?" Part of your job as a storyteller, part of the writer's jobs here on the show is to mine all of these characters for maximum conflict and drama. There is an overarching design to the season, these stories are more than just romantic stories, and people have to trust that the journey we are taking them on is one that is designed to give audiences both what they want and what they need.

CF: The other thing, Alan, is you know us, we've watched way too much television growing up. We're very familiar with all the will-they-won't-they romances out there. It's an equation that we're always constantly thinking about. We realize there's the pitfalls as well as the successes.

JS: And to whatever fan out there who thought the way to get the story back on track was to boycott the show, we're about ready to start writing the finale, which is 12 episodes later than the one last night. Look, we are in a dogfight for our survival once again, and it would be a shame if people reacted in a way that was scorched earth.

CF: Who closes the book after chapter seven? That's the thing.

Were there times during "The OC" where you were either aware of fans reacting negatively to a relationship story or even reacted in terms of how you wrote it going forward?

JS: All I can say is, this is not an OC situation. This has been planned. It's not that. There are factors driving the story that are not just about will-they-or-won't-they?

But you can understand, given what happened at the end of last season, how fans might feel more entitlement towards this show than most other shows out there.

JS: Absolutely, but people have to remember: we came up with a big, game-changing - I know you hate that term, it'll be your version of shipper - finale last year, that could have been, I think, more potentially alienating to the fans than, I think, an episode or two of more romantic angst. But we did that because we felt we knew these characters and the show and knew what we needed to do to keep the show evolving and moving forward and interesting and compelling and creatively fresh. The fans rode with us on that one, which was a really big buy, and I think they've been very satisfied with how that's played out this year, and we ask for their patience here again. If the trade-off of having fans be this invested in the fate of your show is this reaction the morning after, I would take it every single time. Personally, I love it.

CF: I'm in a state of anxiety.

JS: I think it's great. It means people are invested. It's exciting. It was more of a cliffhanger than we intended.

Getting back to what you were saying before about the Intersect 2.0, there were some people who were surprised there hasn't been more kung fu from Chuck and more growth, while other people think he's evolved too quickly, and is darker and not the guy he was in the first couple of years. How do you maintain that balance of letting the character evolve without taking him too far away from the guy people liked in the first place?

JS: Quite frankly, I think that's what we're doing. For people to feel like there should be more, and people who feel like there's not enough, I think that means we're probably somewhere in the middle. As Chris said, in chapter seven of book three of the Chuck saga, that's kind of where you want to be. If we were doing a show where three seasons later, Chuck was still sitting in the car, and was still as scared as he was in day one, and him and Sarah had never progressed, and therefore never could regress from their progression - a lot more frustration.

CF: From our perspective, working on the season finale now, we have super-epic things that are coming up in the show, and we've decided you really have to test the bounds of the show. We have to take the content and take it to its limit. So there's incredibly emotional, game-changing, huge moments coming up. We're excited by that. So the notion of someone closing the book before you get to the best part is crazy.

JS: The end of this season is going to be as revolutionary to the concept of the show, if not moreso, than last year was.

The ratings this week were a bit down from previous weeks. Do you think it was just CBS getting a bump the day after the Super Bowl?

JS: I don't attribute it to any one thing. Barring this week, it's been a pretty consistent number. Certainly, CBS had a lot of NFL momentum, people are still sampling, we're against Bachelor and House. A lot of tough shows.

Well, you're going to be off the air for a few weeks. Any concern about the numbers dropping when you come back?

JS: Sure. Every time you go off for a couple of weeks, you've gotta self-start again when you come back. We always knew coming back in January would be great for us, but it also meant other things would be premiering. NBC's been incredibly supportive of the show in getting us launched, but I would not expect to see a lot of promotion for us during the Olympics.

Moreso than any other episode this season, last night was very light on the supporting cast because of the budget stuff you've been dealing with. In terms of the way you've been portioning it out, as the season moves along, are we going to have more of a full roster going forward?

JS: Part of the reason why we're rationing the way we are in certain episodes like last night is so that we can have everybody down the line. We've had budget cuts. Hopefully you haven't really seen it on screen in terms of the production values of the show, but it does affect the number of actors we can use in the number of episodes, and we want to bring in new actors as well, and all that is coming from the same honeypot.

Initially, you were only going to have 13 episodes, and you wrote accordingly. One of the comments, even from people who weren't necessarily upset by the Sarah/Shaw thing, is that it came pretty quickly. In a 22-episode season, or even if you'd known going in it would be 19 episodes, is that something you would have let percolate a little longer, or did you want the symmetry of the two of them getting together in the same episode as Chuck and Hannah?

JS: The symmetry was always designed. Are things happening in the first 13 episodes in a slightly more accelerated way than they would if we'd know we'd have 19? Probably. But that's good for the audience. No stalling going on here. No filler.

CF: Our perspective is to always tell more story, to accelerate it and tell more. And I think so much of last night was that Shaw saved Sarah's life. That's another component to the Shaw/Sarah relationship.

I asked Josh before if there's anything he would want to tell the fans to hold them over the next few weeks. Chris, is there anything you would want to tell them?

CF: For Josh and I, we do appreciate our fans so much. Getting on the phone with you is about that direct communication.

JS: We don't feel we have to defend what we did. We wouldn't take it back, we wouldn't change anything. This is just to merely help explain to people over the hiatus what our seasonal vision is.

CF: What's important for us is, don't close the book yet. We've got some amazing stuff coming up.

JS: And if you thought the end of season 2 was crazy...

Alan Sepinwall can be reached at asepinwall@starledger.com Click here to read the full post

Scrubs: Some thoughts from Bill Lawrence

The hotel's bandwidth is just good enough that I was able to Slingbox tonight's "Scrubs," which I thought continued the show's recent creative upswing - and was the first episode to do so while featuring Zach Braff. (It was also the last Braff episode of the season.) Rather than do a review, though, after the jump I'm going to run some quotes from an interview I did with "Scrubs" creator Bill Lawrence this afternoon at press tour.

Bill said there's still a chance, albeit not a great one, that the show could come back next season. ABC owns it, and it's a known quantity, and there's a chance an episode or two might get to air on Wednesday at 8 (alongside "The Middle," "Modern Family" and Bill's "Cougar Town," all of which were renewed for next season today) before the season is out.

But whether or not the show comes back, he acknowledged there were some creative missteps early this season, specifically in the way that he and his writers handled JD, and in the way the character wound up overshadowing the newbies. I asked if things might have gone differently had they kept JD out of the first few episodes to get more time to establish Drew, Lucy and Cole, but he said that wasn't possible.

"It wasn't a decision that was made creatively," he said. "I think even Zach, in a different world, as a producer with me and a guy who was helping me out a lot, would have approached it differently creatively. I'm not even disagreeing with the business of it. I know ABC's going to sell these episodes as, 'These are Scrubs! They've got Zach Braff in 'em!' My mistake was that I didn't view this as one continual show. I didn't think that people would go, 'Oh, he's regressed! This is so upsetting!' I was really believing my own mindset: 'This is new! This is new! This is new!' The stuff he was doing was the stuff that always made me laugh. But taking a step back, reading what you were saying, I could see, as a viewer it might disappoint me as well. But it didn't disappoint me when the gang from 'Cheers' showed up on 'Frasier' and they were doing old jokes, even though in the finale of 'Cheers' they had moved past their old gags."

And because, in Bill's mind, this was a new show and not a continuation of the series he brought to an end with "My Finale" last spring, some of the creative decisions - like doing multiple storylines where other characters told Denise she needed to soften and open up more to others - were made as if it were season one of "Scrubs Med School" and not season nine of "Scrubs."

"Maybe one of the mistakes of treating this as a new show is that I've always had a belief that in the first year of a new show, you drill home what somebody's about," he said. "You do the pilot over and over. You're not trying to be repetitive, but whether it was 'Scrubs' or 'Spin City' or whatever, you think you have to come out of those first 15 or 20 episodes with people going, 'I know this is the character who is too cold and impersonal. I know this is the character who has burned out before and is fighting to not get in his own way.' Because if people don't, then you can't really start the development. To me, the second year is when you go, 'Now that we know we have a chance to be on for a couple of years, how do we take baby steps?' It's like 'Cougar Town,' now that we've been picked up for next year, how is Bobby the ex-husband - he can't veer off into a dumber and dumber character or he'll be unsalvageable. How do we take steps so he's more of a responsible person without taking away his hillbilly logic that cracks me up so much?"

Whatever you call the series these days, Bill feels - and based on what we've seen the last few weeks, I'm inclined to agree - that "the show gets more and more solid as it goes on. I think if the show did go forward, I can guarantee it would be better, because I know what's working and what has to be fixed. And that's almost the same arc for any show for me. I feel like 'Cougar Town,' we started to find it after five or six episodes. And on the original 'Scrubs,' I felt the same thing. And here I'm finding things I'm starting to enjoy. I really enjoy that Mike Mosley, and I say, 'Hey, even though the show's been on for nine years, we've found a character we haven't done before that we as writers are responding to.' And Eliza Coupe, that's a type of girl I haven't seen a lot of on TV before: not cookie-cutter, but still strong. Once you focus on stuff like that, the people that need to grow and get stronger will."

Finally, I asked him whether, given the low ratings and improbability of another year, he had written a second conclusion for the series, or if he was satisfied with "My Finale."

"No, no, no. This show has no finale. This show to me is a brand-new, 13-episode order of a series that actually got on TV, which puts me ahead of 99 percent of the people. And if it has a chance to move forward, the writers will get together and we'll say, 'We found the things people don't like, and the things they do, so how do we move forward?' At the end of the year, some characters are well-rounded, some need more work. I like Johnny C. and Donald as anchors in the patrician roles, and I like Ken Jenkins floating back through there almost in the way The Janitor used to. I think I could write an interesting show. I don't know if we'll get a shot or not. The only thing that bugs me is when people go, 'Oh, you've killed the legacy of Scrubs!' I don't want to belittle the fact that they loved the show enough to think it had a legacy worth protecting. It's just not the way my personal brain works. I loved the ending of 'Scrubs.' I didn't end this." Click here to read the full post

Doctor Who: David Tennant looks back

"Doctor Who: The End of Time, Part 1" - the first half of David Tennant's farewell to the role - airs tomorrow in the UK and then Saturday night at 9 on BBC America. I haven't seen it in advance, but I do have the transcript of an interview I did with Tennant at press tour back in late July, in which he looks back on his early days in the role, how his Doctor wound up wearing sneakers, how a childhood of pretending to be The Doctor turned out to be very useful when he got to play the role for real, and a lot more.

So read it after the jump, and whether you live in the UK or have, um, some means of accessing the episode after it airs there, please refrain from discussing "End of Time" until after I've seen it and posted about it, either Saturday night or sometime Sunday. Any comments referencing the content of the movie in any way will be deleted.

(Two notes: First, as mentioned, this was done back in late July, before Tennant was cast in his first American pilot, NBC's "Rex Is Not Your Lawyer," so at the end he discusses having early meetings with American producers and trying to gauge how much they know of "Doctor Who." Second, due to mechanical difficulties that I didn't notice until after the fact, the first five minutes of our conversation - most of it devoted to Tennant's recent experience at Comic-Con in San Diego - were not recorded. We pick up with Tennant discussing how he came to his interpretation of the iconic character.)

I'm not quite sure what decisions I made and what just occurred. Somewhere in between making a decision and going with the flow, you end up with a performance.

One of the differences between your character and (The Ninth Doctor) was that you were both sunnier and darker. You could get very angry. Was that something that was on the page when you were starting?

It's how I was interpreting what was on the page, certainly, but I dare say a different actor would have done it very differently. It's one of those characters that is open to personal interpretation in a way other characters might not be. Because he can sort of be anything. You have to just kind of see how it fits with you, I suppose. I love Russell (T. Davies)'s writing, and I respond to it very keenly. I had just done "Casanova," which he had written, and they felt in some ways like very similar characters. I mean, The Doctor does less shagging, but there's a brio, and there's a kind of passion for adventure which I think is similar in both characters. So I possibly brought some of that with me. And the way Russell writes both characters, there's an enjoyment of language and of thought colliding with each other faster than the speed of thinking. Which I've always liked. I like that kind of writing. I'm a big fan of "The West Wing," and the way Aaron Sorkin writes those people who can think and speak faster than the synapses can flash. I love characters who are clever and smart, and you have to run to catch up with. I think there's something very appealing and rather heroic in that. So it made sense that The Doctor should be like that, to me.

How much input did you have into things like the look?

The look was something that myself and the costume designer worked on hand in hand. Russell and Phil (Collinson), our producer, and Julie (Gardner), our exec producer, they would all have an opinion, but basically, Louise Page and I worked it out between us, and threw ideas back and forward and came up with 'the look' - which, again, from the minute you take over is what you're being asked about. And that's quite tricky, because it has to be of its time and yet timeless. And I always wanted a long coat. To me, it feels like The Doctor has to have a long coat, and that's something imprinted on me from childhood, because he always did. And there's something heroic in a flapping coat, but at the same time, I need to get rid of it sometimes and just be a scrawny guy in a suit that doesn't quite fit. So there was a sense of authority to him, but it's undermined by his own carelessness. He wears a suit, but doesn't wear it with proper shoes. Something about that felt right. But, again, we arrived at it slightly by accident.

And it has to be something you can run around in and wear every episode.

Absolutely. I was very keen on soft shoes. That was something I was always adamant about. That was the closest Louise and I had to a disagreement, and I was determined. In the first few episodes, they're my own shoes, because I wanted them to be old and battered and lived-in and falling apart. So until they did fall apart, I used my own shoes. And then, at the point when they didn't have any soles left, we got some new ones. For me, they were never as good again. I love when they were actually falling off my feet.

Someone asked me if you got to keep a pair.

The ones that were mine, we actually ended up selling for charity. So I don't know who's got them now. But I do have a couple of the pairs we used on the show. But there were hundreds of them.

When you're working with Billie (Piper), who'd had a pre-existing relationship with the other Doctor, how do you approach that as an actor, in terms of his feelings for her?

That could have been very tricky, because Billie would have every right to feel it was her patch. But mercifully, because Billie is so generous and so lovely, and such a great actress and wonderful human being, frankly, it was such a joy to work with her, and such a pleasure. Dramatically, that's what's going on between the characters, because she's having to rediscover this new man who's the same man she knew, and how she feels about that. But very quickly, I think we established that relationship that they had was as deep, and ran even deeper ultimately.

That's one of the things I've always wondered about the franchise: does The Doctor have the same feelings for people and things that he did before he regenerated? Does he have the same feelings for Sarah Jane that he did in the '70s?

Not necessarily, but with Rose, he certainly did. Meeting Sarah Jane again was deeply moving for him, I think. And what was interesting there was, he, in a sense, has gotten younger. That's The Doctor's eternal problem: he will always outlive his earthbound friends. And that's a great dramatic opportunity that you don't get in normal drama. You've got this character who's virtually immortal, certainly in terms of anyone from Earth, and how does that impact on those relationships? Even within a fantasy action/adventure scenario, you get to play these wonderful emotional beats. It's unlike anything else.

Patrick Stewart (with whom Tennant recently co-starred in a London production of "Hamlet") has talked about how one of the reasons he keeps being asked to play these iconic science fiction characters is that the training that he has through Royal Shakespeare allows him to give it a gravity and a reality, so it's not just silly men in funny suits.

Well, there's a similar trick - "trick" is underplaying it a bit - to playing Shakepseare and to playing this kind of work: you've got to play it absolutely real. But the language of Shakespeare is slightly heightened, and you have to serve it up. And there's a similar thing to that science-fiction/fantasy stuff, and you have to absolutely ground it in veracity, and yet just serve it up a little bit. I completely get what Patrick says, and I'm sure Ian McKellen might admit to a similar thing. If you can sell that you're the King of Scotland, or Henry V on a tiny stage in a studio theater somewhere, then you can probably sell that you're a starship captain or a time traveler. There is a similar skill there, yeah.

Obviously, when the two of you were working together, you had larger concerns in mind. But was there ever a point where you were able to talk about your shared experience?

We did a bit. He had recently acquired his Star Trek costume after spending years thinking he wasn't going to get it, and I was hoping for mine to arrive, so we talked about that. Of course, it's been a huge part of Patrick's life and my life - as has the Royal Shakespeare Company.

How was it to film your last scene as The Doctor?

Emotional. Thrilling, because the scripts are so exciting. You finally get - this character that we do manage to explore, an emotional life for The Doctor that you might not necessarily expect. Essentially, he has to remain unchanged at the end of each story that the series carries on - but when you get to the point where this version of the character is going to die and he knows he's going to die, the sands of time are running out and the bell is tolling and all those metaphors, you get to take this immutable character to mutable places, and that's very exciting. And emotional, as well. The character's coming to the end of his life, you're coming to the end of your life on the show, which has been all-consuming. Particularly back home, but all over the world, it's a huge deal. It's very important to people, and particularly to me, all of my life. So to be moving on from that - and I know I'll never say goodbye to it entirely; I'm sure The Doctor will travel with me as long as I'm on this earth - that's very moving and emotional, and it was to film it.

I assume you've had some conversations with some of your predecessors about this experience. Did they have any advice? Or thoughts on what it was like for them?

Just that it never really goes away. That it's so loved, you can try to get away from it, but you never will. That's to be embraced, not fought. But I'm still too close to it to really know. Maybe I'll need to be around when the next series starts transmitting before I really know how I feel to have moved on. And I feel hugely privileged to have been one of eleven.

I imagine that, having been a fan of the show as a child, it must be like growing up as a football fan and suddenly you get to play for your club.

I think it probably is very similar. And it's a weird mixture of emotions, because it's such a thrill, and completely surreal to believe you've ended up in this position. And then you get on set, and there's a job to do, and you have to just knuckle down and do it. You can't get too bothered about how absurd it is that you've ended up in this position. But it's still hugely thrilling. The peripherals that come with it are very weird: to be on a comic strip, to be a plastic figurine, to be on a t-shirt, and a cake and whatever else it is. They make everything now! They make soap, and anything you can care to think of. That's weird. That's not something you're prepared for at drama school, that whole side of it. Being a merchandisable commodity is peculiar. But a wonderful experience to have had.

Is this something that, as a child, you had ever fantasized about: 'One day I could be The Doctor'?

Yes, but never realistically. Never really. It was a sort of whim. Because, like, there are only 11 of us. I was much more likely to play Hamlet than I was to get to play The Doctor. And both of those were pipe dreams. There's only 11 of us, only 8 of us alive who have had that honor. It's a giddy reality to confront.

Were there certain parts of it that were either exactly as you might have imagined, or not at all as you had imagined? Like being in the TARDIS?

Being in the TARDIS never stopped being a thrill. It's such a wonderful set, and such an iconic thing. Anytime you did start to get blase about it, there'd be a new guest member of the cast who would come and get thrilled with it again. We all grew up with it. It's part of our race memory. You'd always be reminded, when someone new came on the show, how exciting it was. Everyone wanted to be photographed in the TARDIS, or to show their kids, or grandchildren - and, frankly, to be in it themselves. Everyone wanted to be by the TARDIS console, and with their arm around the Dalek.

And playing a scene opposite a Dalek or a Cyber-Man, that's got to be quite surreal for you as well.

Quite surreal - but really cool! The Daleks particularly. They have these operators inside of them, and they manage them so adeptly. And we have the voice on set - Nick Briggs - and it's wired up with cables, so the lights light up as he speaks. They happen, right there in front of you, all at once. Playing a scene with a Dalek, you can really immerse yourself in that reality. Some of the monsters are CGI or green-screen, and others are rubber head there, elements added afterwards, but the Daleks are live in front of you, happening.

But there was never, early on, a case of it being hard to focus on the acting because, "Hey, I'm in a scene with a Dalek"?

I'd say the opposite of that. Because if your formative experiences are pretending to do that on the playground, it's remarkably easy to just access that fantasy life again. I don't think that's underselling the process of acting. It's just an easier fictional world to surrender yourself to, because childhood memories are so potent. When you're being paid and allowed to, you can give yourself over to the fantasy very easily.

One of the themes, going back to "The Christmas Invasion," is that your Doctor can be a very destructive force. Donna says he needs to be controlled and all that. Is he a good guy? Is he a bad guy in your mind? A mix of things? Something more complicated?

It's complicated. He's had some very difficult experiences, with the Time War that we hear snatches of. He was clearly there when his own people perished. That left him with emotional scars, and he does have this tendency - there seems to be a slightly alarming tendency to bloodlust, in there somewhere. It's quite well repressed. He's basically morally pure and righteous, but there's a possibility of hubris in there. And that's something we will explore in these final stories. There's an Achilles heel there that he isn't entirely resistant to.

Well, speaking of the Time War - when you play Hamlet, and you're doing a scene about your father's death, the character you're playing has experienced this directly. The Doctor that you're playing sort of was in the Time War, but again, sort of not.

We'll find out slightly more about that before the end. It won't be more explicit.

But getting back to what I asked about earlier, he's had these experiences that he didn't really have. How do you access the emotions of things that Eccleston experienced in the first season, or that the previous Doctors went through? Ten is a different character from them.

Yes, but he's the same man. It is a peculiar one. There's no right or wrong about it, I guess, and you pick and choose when you're the same man and when you're a different man, if we're being honest about it. Clearly, he's the same man who experienced this. He still lost every member of his own race. That doesn't change when he regenerates. That's still something he has to deal with, so I think he still feels those scars.

So something that happened to Paul McGann happened just as much to you?

Exactly. And when he meets Sarah Jane again, it's the same man as met Sarah Jane before. And that's how she responds to it. She might be disconcerted that he's younger, but she gets that it's the same man.

Well, speaking of youth, the three of you in this modern era are a fair amount younger than most of your predecessors.

Well, I'm a little younger than Chris (Eccleston), and Matt (Smith)'s a lot younger than me.

Do you feel that that version of the show that Russell's created and that Steven (Moffat)'s going to carry on almost requires a younger man, just because of the physicality of it?

I don't know. I think you could write the show to whoever was in the part. I don't think I'm wrong that Steven didn't intend to cast an actor as young as Matt. His instinct was to take it a bit older again. Clearly, it comes down to the actor. The Doctor can be anything, really. So I think you cast someone because they seem exciting and right and enthused and inspiring for the part, and that becomes what The Doctor is. The Doctor can be anything, and if you cast a decent actor, then he's The Doctor, and that's it - whether he's 73 or 23.

There were certain archetypal episodes that Russell would do: The Doctor goes back and meets a classic English author, Doctor on a space station, etc. Were there types that you were particularly fond of as you got that point in the season?

I would be fond of them all as they came up, to be honest. Because, unlike most long-running shows where you've got the police office set, and the cafe set, and you tend to visit them again, we have one standing set on Doctor Who. We have the TARDIS, and we're only in it for about a minute each week. So each episode had such a particular life about it - a particular guest cast, it looked different, we filmed them in different places - that each one lives very distinctly in my memory. We got to go to Rome to film the Pompeii one. And then some of them we would film completely in our studios in Cardiff. But each one feels distinct in my memory. The variety was absolutely the spice of it.

Do you feel, having been through Comic-Con, and having seen how The Doctor is perceived at least by some people here, that having done this role might give you more of an entree to doing things here if you wanted to?

Maybe. Certainly, it's been interesting being in LA for a few days, meeting people and seeing what response you get. But Doctor Who, it's a funny one. I think people who love it, love it, and are passionate about. And people who don't love it, don't even know about it. So we're in an interesting place here. And that's coming from Britain, where it's part of popular culture. I still don't quite get where we sit in American culture. But it's fun finding out.

Alan Sepinwall may be reached at asepinwall@starledger.com Click here to read the full post

When TV critics attack

A few weeks ago, I met in New York with Mo Ryan and James Poniewozik to enjoy some fine pizza at John's in Times Square. While we didn't manage to create a TV show the way that Joss Whedon did over pizza that time with Eliza Dushku, we did talk a lot about "Dollhouse" and a host of other TV nerditry, and Mo recorded and transcribed the whole thing. The first of three parts, focusing mainly on "Lost," is up today, and Mo will post the other two tomorrow and Friday. (I'll link to them then.) And just enjoy the fact that I can be every bit as rambling and tangential and non-grammatical as my interview subjects. Click here to read the full post

Sons of Anarchy: Kurt Sutter season two Q&A

So "Sons of Anarchy" season two has come to an end, and I have both a review of the finale and this transcript of the interview I did with "Sons" creator Kurt Sutter about all the things that happened in the finale (and the season before it), what the hold-up is with the third season renewal, and more. There are some mild spoilers for what Kurt plans to do in that third season, so read on at your own peril if you want to stay totally pristine, but know that this was stuff I felt comfortable including.

So I watched the finale, and the first thing I thought was, "This is a man who does not have concerns about coming back next season."

Wow. What does that mean?

It just means you leave a lot of things hanging out there.

In terms of?

Gemma's a fugitive, Abel has been abducted, Half-Sack is dead… I guess Half-Sack being dead isn't something hanging out there, but there is a whole lot to be resolved.

Right, right. Let me just start, because I know people are going to be pissed off about the Half-Sack thing. I will tell you that I've been having conversations with Johnny Lewis all season, and Johnny wasn't happy on the show. Creatively, he really wanted out of his contract. We had ongoing conversations, and we decided we'd find some noble way for him to go. It wasn't my intent to try to be sensational and kill off a main character. People are going to have their reaction, but I don't want an actor that's not happy. It's not good for the actor, and it's not good for the show. I love Johnny. I'd work with him again in a heartbeat.

But in terms of some of the other stuff - this was clearly written with confidence that you would have another season to deal with it.

It would suck if the show ended right now. I had this idea, and I didn't know when it would happen, but I did know I wanted to play out this notion of Abel being taken and what that would do to Charlie and the club. Ideally, and I think it came across, is the idea that it's so outside the parameters of the outlaw handbook that it was clearly like, "What the f--k?" That's something that doesn't happen within their world. You don't f--k with family. The fact that that rule was broken; the impact isn't, "Ohmigod, I'm going to kill this guy." It's, "What just happened?" That really is my hope for next season: to take them into a world that is outside their own, where they don't have control, where they are subject to other people's laws and beliefs and perameters. Where they aren't quite the big fish in the small pond.

How much confidence at this point do you have that the renewal is going to be finalized?

I've had conversations with (FX president John) Landgraf, and of course the show's going to be picked up. What happens in season three, dude, is my contract is a two-year contract, historically actors get a bump between season two and three. FX, really the burden of that lands on them. They are the co-producers of that show. They really had to get all their financial ducks in a row. Once you announce the actual pick up, it sets the ball rolling. My thought was that we would hopefully find out before the finale. Obviously, that clock is ticking. But I've been assured there will be a season three. My deal is pretty much done, but it's a matter of finalizing all the other deals. And then they'll make the announcement.

One of the things I used to talk with Shawn Ryan about on "The Shield" was that you guys would come up with some kind of trap the strike team would find itself in, and then spend three or four days figuring out how they'd get out of it before you began writing anything. Do you know how the kidnapping and everything else will resolve themselves now, or is that something you're going to solve during the hiatus?

I do. It's not by any plan of mine, but what happens is about halfway through the season, I have a good sense of where I'm going to go in the following season. By episode six or seven, I had a good sense of what the big story arcs will be for season three. I do know how it will be resolved, the big story arcs. I'll go in in the beginning of the season, and we'll start hanging the meat on those bones.

Well, I don't want to know too much about what's coming, and I'm sure you don't want to say much, but is it safe to assume we might see the club go to Belfast?

I think it's okay to tease this, because I think it'll be cool. I'm actually working with (the studio) now on how best to - clearly we're not a show that can up and move everybody to Belfast. Does that mean having a second unit work out there to match some shots? But the plan is to take the charter to Ireland.

Do you have Titus Welliver locked up yet (to keep playing Jimmy O)?

I don't have Titus locked up. For all those secondary characters, we're really at the mercy of people's schedules. Sometimes, that'll happen, and you'll be forced to write around characters. That happened in the first season. We had an actor that was playing the Irish contact, and we lost him to "Brotherhood," so we had to kill him off, and bring in another character. I love Titus. I think he had a really good time working on the show, and I think we can juggle it and make it work.

Okay, going back over some leftover business from this season: do the charges from the raid on the church go away because Zobelle fled the country? Or are they still in trouble because the cops caught them red-handed with guns?

It doesn't go away. Again, there's a lot of stuff, and I'm not saying this is a good thing or an excuse, but there are a lot of details that tend to fall away in scripts, and then in actual cuts. In fact, next season all that stuff will come back and have a big impact on them. They get away with stuff in Charming because they get away with stuff in Charming. But all this stuff, the federal charges for having assault weapons, all that stuff is there. We have the same sort of loose timeframe that we had on "The Shield." Sometimes, it's a day, and sometimes it's a week, but the truth is, there's not a whole lot of time that has passed.

And are we to take it that Georgie was the one who killed Luann before he skipped town for Thailand?

I think that'll also come back. Right now, there's a couple of pitches on the table that may change that. Right now, that's really where it stands. I don't know about you, but I thought Tom Arnold did a really good job, and I'd like to see him back if we can.

Yeah, he was good. It's just that there was some ambiguity about whether Georgie did it, or possibly Zobelle, or one of the club's other enemies.

I think right now the perception is that it is Georgie. For me, story-wise, that's fine. But it may actually change.

Did the club stand down from the fortress mentality of "The Culling" once Zobelle and Weston were arrested? I was wondering why Tara and Gemma were out and about like that, even with Half-Sack as bodyguard, and why Tara wound up back at Jax's house when Cameron found her.

I think so. For me, the blowout that happened at the end of (episode) 12 was really all about knowing that Weston wasn't going to hold true, he was going to bring his power base to the timberlands, and that (SAMCRO would) be able to, at the very least, injure them enough and take them out enough to cut off Zobelle's muscle. Which they were able to do. So, to me, Weston and Zobelle being in jail allows them to stand down from (the fortress). But they're still not going to let Gemma and Tara go out alone. Even though it's Gemma, who could probably snap Half-Sack in half, they won't let them go out without some kind of escort. There's definitely an awareness about that.

Initially, I had written that scene (where) there was ongoing discussion about the baby, and I just felt like, even leaving the clubhouse, there was something about Gemma not letting that baby out of her sight. That was an ongoing discussion, but I just felt, and then how it segued into the event with Polly. I just love the notion of the baby essentially being in the car while that conversation happens.

Knowing the kind of man Jax is, and the kind of dad he is, I can't imagine he's going to be able to think about anything else in this world so long as his son is missing. Does that mean that all the tension within the club goes away while they're searching for Abel?

I say this a lot, and it's sort of my mantra on the show: none of that stuff happens in a vacuum. I do believe that Jax and Clay are ultimately able to put aside their immediate differences, in the same way Opie's able to put aside his feelings, but the wounds are there. The scar tissue is not very tight. That's the kind of stuff that will not go away, and will always impact their relationship for the rest of the series. We're going to really see Opie struggle with that next year. How does he do that? How does he show up and cover Tig's back knowing what he knows? That stuff will always continue to play out. It's hard sometimes, to have that nuance play out in every scene.

Well, I remember when you set up this storyline last season with Donna getting killed, I thought to myself that when the episode came where Opie found out, there was no way that he, Clay and Tig would all leave that episode alive. Yet you came up with a solution that made sense.

I liked the notion - to me, it really spun on Piney - that Piney had the same fear that you did. Ultimately, he was going to take that on himself so it didn't have to fall on his son. Within that, it gave me an out for Opie. Then it's about Opie saying, "I want to put a bullet in your head, but I'm not going to do that, because you're going to give my old man a pass for trying to put one in yours." It just felt like a way out. But Piney still has no love for Clay, and Opie is willing to go to the mat now to protect Gemma and to protect the club. If I'm Tig, I'm not trusting this guy.

What did you have in mind with the scene in "The Culling" where Tara slaps around Margaret?

The conversations that I've been having with Maggie (Siff) all along - because it's so not who Maggie is, she's really a sweet, fragile soul - has been, it's not so much about Tara finding the ability to change and to accept (the violence), it's really about her continuing to suppress what she already has inside her. And for me, that's always been underneath Tara. We saw some of that with Kohn. I felt that she's had these strong influences all year with Jax, and what we saw happen to Gemma, and if we didn't see some of that break open, and some of that spill out from her former life, that would almost be a disservice to who she had been.

Knowing that, and doing that scene, I did know what would happen in the finale, which is that ultimately, the same violence she supported and ultimately participated in, comes back to bite her in the ass, and terrifies her. By the end of the finale, she's breaking down. I knew that I was going to go there, and I knew that I would see some of that bleed out, and I think that has a lot to do with the trauma that she feels afterwards. She knows that's a part of it. She patched the guy up who ultimately put a gun to her head.

Well, I like that even before Cameron shows up, there's that scene where Gemma's in the car giving this megalomaniacal speech about how God has put her on Earth to do this, and you can see Tara freaking out and thinking, "Wait, this is who I've been using as my guru?"

I think so. She starts to see it there. For me, I just love the notion, and not that I'm trying to make a huge statement about man and religion, but the idea that most people, when they go through this trauma and are suddenly feeling karmic guilt and questioning all they do, they're driven to a point of repentance. And Gemma, being exactly the megalomaniac she is, somehow manipulates it to her advantage, in that, "Oh, wait a minute. God gives me the license to do whatever the f--k I want to do." It's what the religious right does, and it's what the radical Muslims do. You interpret to substantiate your agenda. To me, the most upsetting thing in that scene is seeing how f--king calm Gemma is. That's what Maggie plays so beautifully: "Ohmigod, you are calm. You actually believe what's coming out of your mouth."

Why is Gemma willing to kill Polly when she couldn't pull the trigger on Weston? Is it just how much she's healed from the incident, or that she was afraid of AJ but isn't of Polly?

I think it's a little bit of both. Hearing Weston talk about his sons f--ked with Gemma at the time, but I also think Gemma has come much further in the crisis at this point. I think the scene with the priest was this pivotal moment for her. That's where the seed was planted: this is what God does, and it's all about being of service. I think she has that now in her favor. So it does give her the capacity, at the very least, to not be conflicted about pulling the trigger. If she had the awareness at the port-a-john, she would have put a bullet in the back of his head.

And instead Weston gets shot in a different toilet.

Heh. I hadn't thought of that.

So much of the bad things at the end of the episode are caused by Stahl. After all the screw-ups she's had investigating the Sons over the last two seasons, why is the ATF still leaving her in charge of the case, and giving her so much free rein?

I think she's been on point all season. She says early on that it's not about the Sons. I think she's backed off of that. She's really doing her job this season, which is to go after the guns. For the most part, the case is holding up, and she is gaining on it. Up until this point, she's sort of proven herself as being on point with what the case is in going after Jimmy O, and Jimmy O is a big fish. But I do think that the machinations that happen at the end here, really it's about her covering her tracks. Ultimately, the guys will try to take advantage of that next season. At the very least to try to help Gemma.

One of the cool things we were able to do on "The Shield" with the Kavanaugh character was, when you're that close to something and someone that you can't help but be influenced by it. Kavanaugh could not help but be influenced by the machinations of Vic, and ultimately, it impacted him and the decisions that he made. That's the same thing with Stahl. She's done some nefarious stuff within the boundaries of her job, in terms of how she threatens people, but she crosses the line here by essentially doing what we've seen the Sons do all along, which is to manipulate the truth and create a secret. That's the turning point for her.

And of course it's all perspective. On a different show, Stahl would be the hero. But on this show, we're horrified when she does something the Sons do, yet we like them when they do the same things.

I like to say that Vic Mackey was 60 (percent) good, 40 bad. The Sons are 40 good, 60 bad. I think it's important, and I was talking to my writers about this the other day: It's really important for me to never just paint people black and white. I do think Stahl has compassion for what happened to Gemma. I do think that when that happens, it does impact her. The same thing with Hale. We've seen that guy set up as the antagonist, who ultimately throws them a bone at the end by not sending the sheriffs. It'll be an interesting season next year. Unser will step down at the beginning of next season. It'll be interesting to see Hale navigate without the cooperation of the Sons. That's going to be fun to explore. Will he need to compromise the way Unser did to maintain civility in the town?

And having a guy like Hale, who's essentially good-hearted and means well, allows you to then write a character like Stahl or Kohn, so it's not just "Sons good, cops bad."

My brother-in-law was out for Thanksgiving. He's in the FBI, and he loves the fact we're painting ATF as scumbags. The federal divisions are so f--king competitive. He's like, "Yeah, they're all scumbags. They're all tripping over themselves."

What's the book on tape you're listening to (as Big Otto) right before you shiv the guy who blinded you?

It's actually from an old periodical called The Dublin Review from the 1800s. Quite honestly, what I did is I didn't want to have to pay for anything, so I just Googled "Sons of Anarchy" and went to books that are in the public domain, and I found this great old book that had all these great articles about the hypocrisy of governments. And the sons of anarchy that he talks about are a reference to the rebellious republic. It's actually a fascinating article that was written almost 200 years ago. If you read it, you'd feel like it could have been written today.

I was surprised the homemade bullets from the Native American tribe didn't figure in more to the end of this season. Were you just laying pipe with that for future seasons?

I actually ended up loving that storyline a lot, and it's a really interesting world. I think we will definitely come back there next season. 

There's that scene near the end where Unser is driving Gemma out of town, and he looks so happy to be with her, because he loves her, and he gets to be her hero and do things without Clay or the other Sons around. It's just him and Gemma having an adventure, and it's the best thing that's happened to him in a long time.

I think they've always had a bond, and whether it's brotherly or whatever it is, I think he's got a connection to her. As f--ked up of a situation as she's in, I just felt there was a sense that Gemma would have, that the rest of the family is falling apart without her knowledge, but for her, "My circumstances are f--ked up, but emotionally, I'm f--king back.' There was just something interesting about her feeling whole, while everyone else was crumbling.

In the first season, you had to spend a lot of time establishing the world and building the major characters like Jax and Clay and Gemma, and it feels like we got to know more of the supporting characters this time around. Was that a concentrated effort on your part, or did it just happen?

I think it was a concerted effort, from the standpoint I have writers who have favorite characters. I knew, ultimately, what the big arcs were going to be, but we tried to bring out a couple of people. The interesting thing is we didn't do a big Bobby storyline, but through the circumstances, we were able to shine a light on what his role (in the club) was. The stuff that happened with Tig was just the residual angst of what happened last year. There was a lot of the Opie and Jax and Opie and Clay dynamic, so even though Opie and Jax didn't have a lot of scenes together, we really saw the impact on that relationship. Without there being a huge arc for any particular character, we were able to distinguish dynamics and purpose and focus within the club. Hopefully, we'll continue to do that.

Yeah, you were able to take a guy like Chibs off the bench in these last few episodes and build him up into somebody really important and tragic.

To me, that all felt organic, knowing what I wanted to do with the IRA, and playing out that relationship. Hopefully, we'll see some of that play out next year with Chibs. That storyline was a lot of fun for me to write, and Tommy (Flanagan) just stepped up to the plate and did a great job. And Unser, too. I just love writing for Dayton (Callie). I think you mentioned it in one of your other blogs, that we'll eventually find out he's related to Charlie Utter. I was a huge fan of him on ("Deadwood"), and he's such a soulful guy, and it's been fun to play that out. There was a moment that happened in that episode, that wasn't scripted, Clay comes out of the clubhouse and gives Unser a big hug, and Unser's response to it was he was almost taken aback. I love the way Dayton played that. He didn't know that was a good thing or a bad thing,. I just know that whatever I throw at the guy, he can handle.

Finally, because I know people will ask: why doesn't Clay leave Tig or Happy or somebody like that behind at the convenience store to take care of business with Zobelle while the rest of the club goes off to help Jax?

I thought about that, and there's a couple things. One was, I wanted to make a statement: I do believe that guys like Zobelle f--king get away. And also, I felt like him saying, "They took my grandson," that ultimately, Clay doesn't have the foresight to say, "Hey, you stay behind." Again, there was that notion that this was completely out of the rule book. And they're in as much shock as they are rage. At that point, nobody is going to desert the club. It's not about that thing now; it's about this thing. We can always come back and take care fo this. It's about helping take care of family, and that ultimately, family is more important than revenge.

Alan Sepinwall can be reached at asepinwall@starledger.com Click here to read the full post