MONDO EXTRAS

Right. You've moved on. But I know you were mad at first.

I was much more upset by the way that Everwood was handled in the last year. When Everwood was moved to Thursday nights and then it was moved back to Monday...if people want to be mad, be mad at the executives that made those decisions, which I think were just asinine. They want to be upset and make t-shirts -- find those executives and put them on the shirts.

Okay, one more question about Everwood. Why'd you get rid of the narration [by Irv]?

Rina hated it! But she wasn't alone -- the network executives asked her to, and she asked me if she could, and I was okay with that. It wasn't our most accessible device on the show, we didn't always do it great...we did it better than a lot of other shows, but initially the show was more sort of about the town, and so it worked to centralize the show, and it was supposed to feel like each episode was a chapter ripped out of a book.

Did you think about doing one last narration?

We did, particularly in the episode where Irv died and there was so much emotion, but in the end...you'd have to ask Rina about that. Again, though, there were certain critics that came around to the show when we lost the narration, so...I kind of go back and forth about it. There were a lot of great episodes we did where we wouldn't use it, where we would think the narration was sort of gilding the lily, and then there were moments in other episodes that only worked because of it. See, you're seeing my process now.

Do you want to talk about that a little bit, your process and how you get ideas and get things done?

Sure. I read a lot, and...steal...all the time. [laughs] No. If you ever talk to anybody I know, I'm a different person in the morning than I am in the afternoon. In the morning, I wake up really early and write usually between the hours of, like, six and ten. That's when I do most of my creative stuff. By twelve o'clock, you'd think I was the village idiot. Literally, some part of my brain shifts over and I became more of a manager and editor. So that was when I would go in and help people with scripts, or do casting, meetings with networks, that kind of stuff. And then by about three o'clock I was usually so tired I'd say I was "reading a script" or "doing notes." And that meant I was taking a nap. I'd have my little Oprah naps every day that happened to fall around the same time Oprah was on, and I'd watch Oprah and/or nap. Then I'd go work out and to dinner or something, and write at night again. My creative times are when the world is quiet, you know? I definitely had my little rituals -- I'd listen to the same CD over and over again, drink a ton of coffee, clean my whole house, get everything done that I could possibly get done...and finally come back to the page and work on it.