I was very excited to see that Tandy’s new look seems to be sticking through the end of the season rather than being a one-off thing. You guys have somehow managed to top the beard.

Once again, all Will. Someone was asking me about Will, asking did he really walk around like that in public for months? They were saying it was so brave of him. And I told them for a guy like Will, his bread-and-butter is being the guy who will commit 100% to a joke. That’s his core identity. And the scary thing for him would be to do it with a fake beard or a bald wig. I think that would have been much harder for him because it would have eaten away at his soul.

All of the relationships on this show have gotten pretty incestuous at this point with the plot of someone other than Tandy impregnating Carol only blurring the lines even further. You had said that the topic of pregnancy itself drew a real division line in the writers’ room. How did this topic agree with the room?

By the time we got to this story, all of our internal pregnancy concerns had really been resolved. Because we had gone much further in the Tandy/Carol story and they had become a real couple, with a marriage based on things other than just procreation. And also, we had shown that Melissa’s not into making babies and we had gotten different points of view into the show. The kind of story no one wanted to tell anymore was one where Tandy is talking a chick into sex by using procreation as an excuse, or a story where the women are all baby robots. So this one wasn’t that. It was Carol, who has always felt a higher purpose, acting on her calling.

Melissa and Gail are kind of put through the wringer here with what they’ve had to put up with Todd. You guys had discussions about pushing Tandy too far in the first season, were there concerns about Todd’s behavior here as well?