Coupe: “I think if it was on now, people would be going crazy, especially if it was on one of the streaming networks—there’d be more leeway to be a little more edgy and not so cookie-cutter. I think maybe people weren’t necessarily ready for it, particularly the networks. If it was on now, it’d be gobbled up and we’d be winning in every category at the Emmys for comedy. With everything that’s going on in the world right now, people want to fucking laugh. We don’t want it to be silly, stupid humor; we want to feel like we’re in on the joke. I do feel like if it was on now, a lot of things would have to be a bigger deal, like Brad and Jane being an interracial couple or Max being a gay guy, just because of our president. It’s amazing that we didn’t have it in our faces quite so much back then, though of course it was still an issue.”

Knighton: “I think there are a lot of answers. I don’t think we got the support from the network that we needed. Paul Lee had taken over after we were picked up and we weren’t his baby. We were supposed to premiere and then they moved us and put us on against the Olympics and it was all so strange. In fact, we all kinda thought there was no way it was going to even get past the first season because we knew that while we had a lot of love from people, we didn’t have the billboards. We actually wanted to crowdfund to get one single billboard at one point! I think we were just on the forefront on it and if maybe we’d come out a year later, it would’ve worked better. If we were on the air right now with the numbers other shows are putting out in 2018, we’d be a monster hit with the numbers we had. Basically, they fucked up and cancelled it and then all their shows tanked. That was around the time that execs wanted shows to get back to those Friends numbers and they hadn’t caught up with the concept of Netflix and streaming—now they’re letting shows stay on with a .5 or .6—we had a 2.1 or something!”

Wilson: “I really think we suffered being in the crosshairs of network TV thinking they should have higher ratings and not realizing that they were at the beginning of the end. The ratings were better than a lot of network shows that are on now, but we got lost in the shuffle of the panic about network which is still happening. Even if it came out three years later when people started realizing that we had good numbers, we would have hung on, which is a bummer. Maybe it’s best to leave people wanting more, but we’d have loved at least another season.”

Caspe: “In a field so hard to break through and be a hit—and I sort of specialize in things that aren’t hits—it’s hard to know if it would do better [if it came out now], but I will agree that we were definitely a victim of the time. All the ratings were dropping every single year but they kept cancelling stuff in the hopes that the stuff they put on the next year was going to do better. All that said, I think we have a very rabid fanbase but we’re really small. I don’t know if we’d ever be a huge hit, but I still think we should’ve stayed on the air. We were doing well enough that we should still be making the show, but who knows?”