Now that you’ve gone through with something like a time jump, do you wish that you had used one earlier? Would you have preferred to have still held off on it entirely? Or are you content with when you brought one into the program?

KIRA KALUSH: Typically, our show doesn’t skip anything. Each season, played out in real time, is something like two weeks in duration. And that’s worked for us. I don’t think we ever needed a time jump previously because we always had the next idea ready to go. Truthfully the jump wasn’t something we had been planning on, but we wanted to move on to newer stories that we were excited about. We missed old Melissa, we wanted to get to some baby stories, etc. The jump allowed us to show the group getting their act together and finally making this new world work, only to discover that they have to immediately abandon it.

Were there any big plans, arcs, or story beats from this season that ultimately got shelved or you found yourself wildly diverging from what you might have originally had in mind?

ANDY BOBROW: I wouldn’t say we threw out anything good. I mean, we talked about areas and then discarded them if they weren’t coming together. There are a few I can remember. One of them was we had talked about doing a bit of a mystery around Lewis, like there’s something about Lewis’s backstory that’s not adding up. And Tandy and Todd investigate and the find that he changed his identity after the virus. He’s not Lewis, and he doesn’t have a PhD. And I think the story was that the real Lewis was our Lewis’s boyfriend, or a guy he idolized, and when the virus hit, our Lewis stole this guy’s identity. And Tandy and Todd present all the evidence to the group proudly, like, “this guy’s a fraud,” and everyone is like, “who cares? Everyone’s dead, if he wants to be Lewis, let him be Lewis.” But at that point in the story process, I think we kind of realized, a story that ends with “who cares” is maybe not worth telling.

Most of the other stuff we didn’t use was just jokes or bits, not whole stories. At one point in the elevator, we wanted Gail to hallucinate talking to Gordon. Like a real fantasy sequence where the Gordon dummy talks in Will Ferrell’s voice. Another little story beat was this dumb frikkin’ idea we still laugh about: Tandy and Todd are out driving and they see someone on the road. And they’re all excited. Holy shit, another person. But as they get closer, the see it’s a white guy with dreadlocks, and they just keep driving. They don’t discuss it. Just silently acknowledge it was the right choice. I love that one.