MONDO EXTRAS

CB: Ah! Mr. Wu!

PK: Mr. Wu! So they were college pals, and Marty was also a reader at Propaganda, so I fell in hanging out with Marty first, and then John needed a place, so I hooked him up with the apartment above mine when it opened up, like, six or seven years ago. And we became pals and tennis buddies, and after the first half of the first season of Veronica Mars, we needed a writer, and Rob offered it to John, and I pressured him to take it. Neither Rob nor I thought he would, because he was coming off some crazy feature success, but he took it. It appealed to him.

CB: Do you guys still talk shop at all?

PK: Yeah, I mean, on our weekly tennis night, there's a lot of television talk now between sets, which is very funny, but we're just also in similar places in life -- he just had a kid, I have a couple of little kids, you know. And we had a pilot together last year. He's the sort of guy that…you know television, from a business standpoint, is totally brutal and scary and dehumanizing, but you sort of find these people -- if you look at anybody, if you sort of play IMDb games with anybody, you can isolate this great corps of people. I hope that whatever came out of Veronica Mars, the clumping of Diane ["Ruggiero" -- CB] and Rob and John and me, I hope that's something we'll come back to. They're pretty incredible people.

CB: Tell me a little more about the differences between the setups on Chuck and Veronica Mars.

PK: Well, Chuck is a larger-budgeted operation, which I thought was going to solve every problem we ever had on Veronica Mars. But I sort of realized that doing action and comedy at the same time, they're both really demanding genres, so pretty much all the fat I thought there would be on Chuck didn't exist -- instead, we're back to the Veronica Mars mindset where you as a writer are thinking about your number of scenes, and which ones you're going to get on your standing sets, and how you can sort of save money here and streamline story there, which is cool, you know? That's what a producer is supposed to do. But I just thought we'd be rolling in money and be like, "Oh, we'll fix it in post!"