MONDO EXTRAS

PK: Well, those were all broken in the room, so the partnership would begin at the outline phase, and on Veronica Mars, we'd have one person doing the A-story, which was the Mystery of the Week, and the other doing the B and C, the B being the secondary mystery, and the C being the season mystery. And so John and I did probably close to ten of them together, although credited it was probably only six or seven. And we would just alternate who did the A story and who did the B and C. There were definitely times when you'd get a big juicy A-story, but we're very good friends, so we were always able to sort out whose name would come first in the credits and who would get the really fun story of, you know, finding the body in the ice machine, which was one of the sort of hairy ones we were trying to decide in Season Two. And then John and I, we'd spend three days to a week doing our halves, and then we'd throw it all together and make sure we'd have the page count under control, and then we'd normally take, like, a day to just sit down and do a polish, which was always a really fun time, sort of the connecting the stories deal, and making your B-plus jokes into A-minuses.

CB: Did you ever have a major creative difference with a co-writer?

PK: Um…no, I mean, there were times when…it makes you worry in a way, just in general, not recalling any specific instances, but you know, when you're writing with somebody and your name is on it, you sort of want everything to be good enough that you'd be proud of it. And I think John is a fantastic writer and everything he's done is good enough for my name, and I think he's bringing something that I couldn't offer. So we've never had that problem -- only in jest, where one of us wants to do one dumb thing, and the other one wants to do another dumb thing, and we laugh and joke about which one is dumber. But it's never been something like where I cringe watching an episode -- I think we were able to turn things around fast and good and we had a lot of fun doing it. That's something else I really liked about Veronica Mars -- we had a very efficient room where we'd go in and work for five or six hours and then knock off to play tennis. Having a showrunner who shows up at five in the morning and takes that much of the responsibility for himself is sort of an insane luxury. But by the same token, I'm excited that on Chuck I'm getting the chance to do some things that normally fell under Rob's purview. Now I'm a producer on the show, and I feel like I'm producing, so I'm back on a steep learning curve, which is always fun.