Do you guys get a lot of fans that tell you they want Michael and Fiona together romantically because this season there's been a definite hints both subtle and not so subtle in that direction. Do fan wishes have anything to do with that or was that something you'd been planning all along?

Matt Nix: It's certainly important to us that that's something that fans respond to. One of the things that I'm particularly interested in is just the idea that in life, people have complex relationships that remain unresolved all the time. That's a really common experience. That there are people that you can care for deeply and be romantically involved with who for one reason or another, having a conventional relationship with them, no matter how much you might want it, is extremely problematic.

What's emerged for us is that Michael and Fiona are two people who have a really hard time being with other people and at this point, there's no question that they've acknowledged how much they care about each other. They're not really built for stable romantic connections. So really what we're playing with is the idea that they have this unstable romantic connection. That it's something that they can't really settle into and they can't leave alone.

It's something that comes up a lot when people talk about relationships on television. It's always the Sam and Diane model, which is that there's romantic tension between two people and then that romantic tension gets released and then it's all over, right. We're sort of doing the exact opposite of that, which is nothing gets released. When people get together, it is not necessarily true that suddenly everything becomes simpler. Often times everything becomes more complicated.

Sam and Maddy have a unique kind of chemistry and relationship. He seems to have more patience with her than Michael does. Are there any plans for them to have any sort of romantic relationship or is it more just a mother and son or friends type only?

Matt Nix: I can absolutely promise you that Sam and Madeline will never have a romantic relationship. That is creepy and wrong and we would never go there. That said, it isn't really something that I sat down and planned, but it is something that emerged out of seeing the actors together on the screen and just realizing that certainly Sam is kind of Madeline's best friend.

In a roundabout way, Madeline is Sam's best friend. Michael is Sam's best friend mostly, but when it comes to a certain kind of stable, count-on able friendship that doesn't have all of the baggage that comes along with being friends with Michael, it's really all about Madeline and exploring that relationship. I think we really only just go to the point; no it happened in Season Two and certainly in the first half of Season Three where we got to the point where they're the kinds of friends who could have a fight and then reconcile. It's sort of emerged to be one of the more complex and interesting relationships for us to explore. It's not something that you see a lot like an adult man's friendship with his best friend's mother, but it works for us.