DEN OF GEEK: So how did this huge office building become the place where everyone ended up?

MATT MARSHALL: There was a lot of discussion in the writers’ room for a long time of where the group should live this season. We always wanted to do something different than just picking another house to live in. A Silicon Valley self-sustaining office building seemed like a fun wish fulfillment-type of place to call home. It’s basically an adult playground.

ANDY BOBROW: I’ll tell you the whole inside story because it’s probably interesting to someone. We really waited until the last possible minute on this decision. We knew we wanted to move, and we wanted it to be dramatically different. The options on the table were 1. Some sort of Little House on the Prairie situation, like where we could really get serious about frontier hardship; 2. An urban look, like Portland or Seattle, where we could show empty city streets; and 3. This weird idea of a self-sustaining office. We keep reading about the new Apple campus and the new Facebook campus, and this Amazon building that’s going up in Seattle. It’s intriguing to think that those buildings have their own electrical grid and indoor gardens and can pretty much function like bio-domes.

We threw out the Little House idea pretty quickly because it just didn’t make enough sense. They don’t have to live in nature when they can still break into any grocery store and pick up canned goods. We resisted the office idea for the longest time, because many of us, me included, were nervous about having things working too well.

We’ve all started using the word “janky” all the time. The world is janky, Tandy’s inventions are janky. So the idea of placing things in the Apple headquarters, it just didn’t seem janky enough. So we killed the office idea. We decided on a big Victorian bed and breakfast in Portland. We found a mansion in Piru, CA (the Piru Mansion, look it up) where we could shoot. We had ideas about how they would bust down the walls and make it look more open, so it would really be a post-apocalyptic feel, just this rotting old house. We were saying, “oh and they could drive a taco truck right into the lobby and that can be their kitchen.” We were really going to do that.