I've heard that criticism about the promos, that it makes it look like not even a romantic comedy, but a romantic drama.

Yeah, nothing I can do about that. They take the comedy audience for drama and try to get other people to come in for these big romantic moment

It's a good hook though.

It is a good hook. I love the romance myself. It's just almost embarrassing when you see the promos for 30 Rock and Scrubs and there's all these good gags in there, and then there's ours and it's all "I loooove you." And I'm like, OK, that was a good moment, but we had guys in inflatable sumo suits also.

You seem to like to end the season on those big emotional cliffhangers with Jim and Pam.

Well his was a little different this year. I think people expected the end of the "Beach Games" episode, that felt like the end of the season to them, and then we had this hour-long finale. I was trying to change it up a little. We do tend to consider that the emotional stories need something that goes from season to season.

A lot of your actors are writer/performers – was that your choice?

Yeah, that was my choice. I'm a big fan of Monty Python, and the original English show, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant wrote and directed it and Ricky starred in it, and also I worked in Saturday Night Live and there's a lot of writer/performers. It just feel like the best comedy needs consensus between the writers and performers at the same time, and you don't want them to be split into two camps that don't understand each others' points of view. Which I have also observed, or heard stories of on lousy shows. That's a Hollywood factory instinct to break people up and have them do only one role but the real creativity is in making stuff and not being bound by what role they are.

How do you work with them as the head writer?

Well, there are some that are primarily writers but also perform, at least that's how I look at them, and then there's others like Steve, who is obviously primarily the star of the show but also has a lot of creativity in the writing area that he uses when he's improving, and he has a history of being a respected writer on The Daily Show. It's good for him to do drafts of our shows so he sees our problems.

Do you have a traditional writers room?

We do. I run it the way I ran King of the Hill. I don't like to have a room that's larger than six at any given time so I like to break it up into two rooms, or three depending on how many writers are around. They each have a different task. We meet as a big group to discuss direction and psychology and the broader questions, but we don't try to grind through the scripts in a group of 10. I think that's a good rule for all meetings, for
all offices.