As a fan of the Must See TV classics, it was a trip to read this book, and to read the interviews with so many huge NBC players.

My intention was to bring readers closer to the product. If you loved any of those shows, then I wanted you to be at the table and have a sense of what it was like to create that iconic content. The politics and the alchemy, the luck, the wisdom, the creativity—everything that went into bringing those programs together.

There are big names who helped out with this book. How hard was it to get these former actors, writers, and producers to help out with the book?

It took me about two and a half years. But this was a passion of putting together, just really seeking out and interviewing people who brought this product to life. I didn't set out to do it as an oral history. Yet the more I was in a room with Marta Kaufman and David Crane, with [Will and Grace creators] Max Mutchnick and David Cohen, when I was in the room with Noah Wyle,—I just said, "I can't talk about their words. I've got to use their words." It was that strong. So I decided that the oral history form would be the best way to go.

Not everyone in the book came off in a positive light. Are you nervous about some people reading this and how they might react?

First and foremost, my goal was to be honest and to tell the truth, to tell the story. Everyone was on the record. Creating things sometimes is difficult. Childbirth is painful. The birth of a successful television show can be painful as well. We told the story with warts and all. We told it with pain. Management said, "What the hell are you doing? Why are you developing Will and Grace?" It's network television, and we have advertisers to answer to. Advertisers are not ready to embrace, at the core of a show, a relationship between a gay man and straight woman. What are you doing? To make matter worse, we're in business with these writers. We own them. They're under a deal to our company. So it's not like you're wasting somebody else's time and money. You're wasting ours. So that story is told in an honest and true way.

How did you change their minds about Will and Grace?

My feeling was that was my job. My job was to find interesting material that would give us a quality television show. That at the end of the day would be television entertainment. As I looked at the world, we lived in a world where I saw that relationship all the time. It was this gap. Television had ignored it. I knew that Max and David had a great feel for that world and those characters. They just needed to be convinced that we would actually go forward with it if they wrote it. I said to them, "If you do a great job, we'll have to." And that's what they did. So then in order to kind of hip-check my management, I made sure that I went to Jimmy Burrows. When Jimmy fell in love with the project, I knew that no one could stand in the way.