VICTOR FRESCO: Yeah, you know I like to think that you learn from your first ones and then hopefully get better for your second—although sometimes it can get worse. The things that I thought that worked in the show, which we lean into more in the second season, is the core Sheila/Joel love relationship. That’s really the cement that holds the show together. Some people may think of it as a show about the undead, but I think of it as a love story…although obviously there are also other elements to it. At its core, it’s really a love story. We knew this going into the show, but after seeing how great their chemistry is it made us more confident to lean into that in season two.

The other thing that I thought worked well in the first season is that the season takes place in a very short amount of time. I think it’s 17 days or something like that. So every episode is almost one day of time. That allows us to have a lot of urgency and that there’s drive to keep everything moving forward. The second season is very much like that, too.

I love that in spite of all the heightened stuff that goes on in this show, Joel and Sheila still have to deal with their real estate jobs. Do you see these getting progressively phased out as the show goes on, or do you think they’re important to keep the show grounded, so to speak?

That is the challenge, isn’t it? To make those other storylines still interesting. In the second season, the real estate stories come up a bunch because Joel and Sheila are a couple that work together. Part of the fun of the show is to go back and forth from these life or death situations to this suburb stuff. I think the suburb stuff still manages to be interesting because it’s the backdrop to everything else and makes for such a strong contrast. The stakes of selling a house obviously aren’t as high as going to jail for murder, but we try to make them feel somewhat equal.

You guys do such a good job at balancing the show’s violence and its extreme nature with its sense of humor. Did you want to top yourselves at all in this department this season? Were you eager to try and set new benchmarks, like you did with the vomit scene in the pilot?