The cricket food Carol makes here is deeply unnerving. Director Jason Woliner has kind of been your ace in the hole this season, hasn’t he? He’s gotten a lot of the more complicated set pieces from the series and always sticks the landing.

Jason shot a couple for us last year and he was just such a great mesh with our show. We booked him for as many as we could get this year. He’s a weapon. It’s a real tough job, directing TV comedy. The schedule is always really tight and everyone always wants you to make it look “better than a TV show.” We’ve been very lucky with our directors. We’ve gone with mostly up-and-coming directors, people who have made a mark on cable but not in network yet. Woliner is one. Peter Attencio was another last year, who is now too busy for us.

We also picked up Payman Benz for a couple episodes this year, and he’s really wonderful. John Solomon is an old friend of Will’s who was unproven in network episodic TV, but he’s just amazing. And Dave Noel is a writer who also has an editing background and he really did a great job on an episode coming up. Editors make good directors. Claire Scanlon comes from that world as well, and she’s been awesome for us. So we feel like we’ve got the best directors, and hopefully they enjoy working with us so we can get them back for more.

While Tandy is redeeming himself this season, we kind of get to watch the others plummet a few depths as Tandy and Carol try to heal everyone. After spending so much time on Tandy last year, was it nice to figure out what was wrong with everyone else?

Yes! To be honest, we didn’t even brainstorm on it much. We didn’t sit around saying, “Okay, what’s Gail’s problem?” We just kind of stumbled into it when we saw how right she looked with a glass of wine in her hand. And then it was like, “Well what’s funny about her being the doctor? Hmm, probably that wine in her hand.” I feel like, on our show, the character development is very much driven by visuals. Like January Jones just looks really good with a gun. So we run with that and Melissa becomes the badass. And there’s some really great Melissa downslide stuff coming towards the end of the season.