The dialogue is all made up on the fly, but it's not all made up by the actors. There are a few writers and Nick and I behind the camera, and we're improvising as much as the actors are.

I?m not quite as neurotic.

The casting process wasn't so much about them being a character, which is the normal way. The character had to become them.... You've got to bring 70 percent, 80 percent of yourself to the party. And an actor's either willing to expose themselves like that, or they're not.

But it's also a bottomless pit for story ideas.

Where I come from and where Nick comes from, there are a lot of divorces. People are giving it a second go-around on a bunch of different levels.

We wanted to try to see if we could take something as traditionally structured as a half-hour TV comedy format and actually bring improvisation to it.