Fair enough. So, now that all is said and done, how are you feeling about the first season as a whole?

JW: We're really proud. Obviously not just of our contribution to the season, but also the people we assembled. We're also really happy with the product [and] I feel really, really positive about the experience, aside from the product.

MT: As much as you go in knowing working in television is going to be a grind because the demand for the product's turn around is very swift, it was really wonderful how, through the course of the whole season, everyone showed up happy to do the work. It really is a nice environment and I think, as Jed said, we're proud of all the people we have the privilege of working with.

JW: It is such a grind; 22 episodes is a ludicrous ask, but there's an excitement in telling stories on such a grand scale. Even through the grind, everyone felt the enthusiasm to make something cool. It got hard at times, and everyone was exhausted, but the enthusiasm was still there.

MT: Jed and I have been through some real-life shit. I'm just going to say shit. Some real-life challenges, and at the end of the day, if you're not having fun spending your days the way you are, then it's sort of pointless.

JW: We hope people had as much fun watching it as we did making it.

Is there anything, looking back, you wish you'd done differently?

JW: It's so hard because any first-year show has its growing pains, and any first-year showrunner has their growing pains. A lot of our actors were new to it, and there were some bumps in the road, but most of them were necessary and things we had to go through in order to figure out how to run it better and get the ship moving in the right direction.

MT: I think in the beginning a lot of our growing pains were born out of learning how to navigate all the different moving parts. Because there were many — and there were many, many expectations [from] our audience. I think maybe if I were to look back, I wouldn't have read as much of the criticism as I did, only because we knew going in that we had this grand design that coincided with the films, and we knew that we had to slow play things to lead up to that point. If I had focused on that more, I would have saved myself a lot of grief at times.

JW: Whereas I was totally Zen the whole time.

MT: Yeah, he didn't read anything.

JW: I coasted along like I was riding a wave.

You just stayed off the internet the whole time, Jed?

MT: He stayed off the internet more than I did.

JW: Yeah, but Zen does not describe me.

Did anything about the online criticism surprise you?

JW: One of the things that's hard is we had to trust what we were doing and trust ourselves and trust the process of these things airing. It's a little bit frustrating when you're off for a few weeks and everybody's used to watching everything in one big run, so it felt like everyone was waiting a long time for these pieces of the yellow brick road that we were creating to be laid brick by brick. We just had to be patient with it, and that's something we learned. Yes, there was vocal criticism of the show early on; there was also people who loved it, but they were all new characters for the Marvel universe. Now, in the back half of the season, they're invested in the characters, but that took some time. We learned to trust that early on.

Finally, is there anything else you want the audience to know?

MT: I do think we have a lot of crazy stuff in store for Season 2. The questions that we leave you with in the finale, we want to answer them as much as you want them answered.

JW: We're very excited about the idea of a Season 2, even though we're very tired. I would love for someone to stop time, unfortunately…

MT: We have to start [Season 2] right away.

This interview has been condensed and edited.