The ones that were the silliest. Butthole spiders came up over and over again — I don’t know who pitched that the first time, but that became our baseline. The tricky thing about talking about torture is it’s the least funny subject in the world. So it always had to be really silly, like chain saw bears.

But my favorite ones were more specific. Like there’s a joke where Shawn gets zapped into a room and he looks around and he says, “Oh, dammit, I was right in the middle of torturing William Shakespeare by describing the plot of the ‘Entourage’ movie.” That one I loved. There was also one in those webisodes we made where he’s torturing Emily Dickinson by playing her the Joe Rogan podcast.

That’s a delicious treat to give a writers’ room: “We need 50 things that Shawn could be doing right now.” We would write 25 of them in about 40 seconds and then pick our favorite.

The story was tightly serialized and got pretty convoluted. What was the hardest thing to pull off?

I had never worked on a show that had a giant concept behind it. Giant concepts are great for pilots and terrible for shows because once you’re past the giant concept, it’s like, well what the hell happens now?

So I didn’t even pitch the show until I knew what the whole first season was, because you can’t maintain a consistent world for too long unless you know where you’re going at all times. If you don’t know, you’re going to do something at some point that derails you or that becomes inconsistent in the long term.

For example, in the last “Star Wars” movie when J.J. Abrams was trying to course-correct for the previous movie, the opening crawl says “Palpatine is alive” and you’re like, “What’s he talking about? Palpatine hasn’t been in the story at all.” And now this whole story is about Palpatine. Those three movies weren’t broken as one giant thing, so they had to bluntly knock stuff aside that didn’t fit into where they wanted to end up.