The Wire: In the first two episodes, you're setting up the conceit of the show, and in this episode, the consequences start to set in. What were you thinking when you broke this down?

Andy Daly: The first thing to say is when I first saw the Australian version [that Review is a remake of]...the second episode is where he gets divorced, and in their custody scene, which we bumped to episode four, he has all the things he's done in the past brought up and used against him.

That was the moment, watching that, where I was like, "okay, I get what this show is." It's this guy bringing extreme experiences into his own life, things that people are asking somebody else to do because they don't want to do them and shouldn't be done. The repercussions it has on the rest of his life, that's what the show is about.

This is sort of a narrative show, with a sketch-like quality in that he embarks on a new project every so often.

Right, I just don't think you can tell the story of what it's like to have an extreme life experience without seeing everything it does to the rest of your life. It has to be about that. So they did it in their second of six. We were setting out originally to make eight, so we wanted to establish the pattern a little more before we did that. Knowing that in the Australian version he does get divorced and stay divorced, and it does deal with it a little bit further. And we, really it was [director] Jeff Blitz, who said if we're going to do that, and hew to reality and have him break up his marriage in episode 3, that's something we really want to hang the season on, that's such a gigantic thing to do. That's kind of what the rest of the season is about, in a way.

Is anything else from the Australian episode? Was the pancakes your invention, or was it inspired by anything?

That was ours. I have to confess, the script for episode three originally went 15 pancakes, divorce, Batman, 30 pancakes. In the editing process, we realized that was way too much show, so we figured out a way to bump Batman to episode four. But we wanted to put this giant life-changing thing around all this frivolity.

When this show began, why he's doing this is not really clear. With every episode, you're layering in a little more about who this guy is and what's driving him to do such objectively insane things.

Right. Well we have this restriction we've placed on ourselves that it's not a show within a show, it's only the show. So everything we're seeing is for the show. Each one of these pieces is an exploration, and there's nothing in it that Forrest doesn't feel is essential to us understanding it. It's a little hard to get exposition and backstory into these pieces, because he's really just trying to tell us the topic at hand.

So when he's showing us [behind the scenes footage of] the producer, or the intern at the office, he's decided we need to see it.