DEN OF GEEK: First off, when starting the series, how much of the mystery had you figured out right from the beginning?

MICHAEL SHOWALTER: Not very much. We wrote the pilot and shot the pilot with only a very vague idea of where everything would go if we got a series. And then, even most of what we did think was going to end up happening ending up changing anyway. We really created and figured it all out once the show had already been picked up for a series, post-pilot.

What’s the working relationship like between you and your co-creators Charles Rogers and Sarah-Violet Bliss? What do you guys bring out in each other for this project?

Well I met them at NYU grad film school where they were students and I was on the faculty. They took my writing class.

And then when they came out to LA after they had graduated, I hired them to work on my show, Wet Hot American Summer [First Day of Camp]. I had already kind of become friends with them socially prior to that. Comedically, we all kind of cross over. Their work is a little more—I tend to be very silly and meta—they’re much more grounded, but also their characters are quite exaggerated in their own way as well. And then generationally, they’re very much coming from a millennial perspective and my generation is Generation X, but I was also doing comedy in my early twenties and kind of understand what it’s like to write from a generational point of view.