Sitcoms do occasionally kill off main characters, though it’s usually in extraordinary circumstances that either involve the actor dying in real life or the actor having a very public falling-out with the creative team or the network . Proksch is very much alive, and by all accounts a polite and easygoing actor.
Simms: I did have a big fantasy, when we’d written the whole season, of shooting as much as we could without Mark knowing. But since we read all our scripts before we start shooting, I realized there wasn’t any way to do it. And later I realized that’s kind of a lousy thing to do to an actor.Colin, in the form we’ve seen for these three seasons, was a really funny character.
The Nandor episode is great, but it has lodged that Barenaked Ladies song in my head ever since. How did you land on “One Week” as the avatar of all things mundanely human? Simms: Filming the little chunk at the end of this episode was deceptively easy. And now we are realizing the corner we’ve painted ourselves into. We are succeeding, but the challenges are so much greater than we thought.
In both last week’s episode and the finale, there are montages from throughout the season that place stories in new context, first with us realizing that Laszlo has known all along that Colin was dying, and then with us seeing the chain of events that made Nandor so depressed. Were those ideas planned out in advance?