We had the pleasure of talking with 30 Rock executive producer Robert Carlock and star Jack McBrayer about Season 5 which premieres this Thursday night on NBC. Check out below!

There's a lot of hype about the live episode you have coming up. It's so different from any of the past episodes, I was just wondering you know how are you two preparing for that?

Robert Carlock: Yes, well we just read an early draft of it today. We're mainly preparing by trying to be as far ahead of it as we can be. It's sort of a - you know it's a new thing for us, it changes the way we write the show because we're used to being able to do a lot of things really quickly and cut away in a lot of scenes and a lot of flashbacks.

And trying to keep the tone and the pace of the show the same within the limitations of - just from a writing standpoint, the limitations of doing a live show is really different and really fun in a lot of ways.

So I think we have trying to do sort of a weird way we can still do flashbacks where maybe other actors play our actors in flashbacks just because we want to do all of it live and we can't have people you know teleport across to another set.

So we're trying to make it - the challenge from the writing standpoint to us is try to make it feel like a 30 Rock show while only say having access to three sets when usually we're out on location and that kind of thing.

But mostly I'm preparing by trying to get a lot of sleep and doing pushups.

Jack McBrayer: From an acting standpoint I know one thing that I'm really worried about is the number of mistakes that we make on a usual shoot, we don't necessarily have that luxury so cross your fingers friend.

Robert Carlock: Yes, the mistakes will be part of the fun Jack.

So what exactly should we expect to be at the start of this season based on what we saw with the finale with Kenneth leaving NBC?

Jack McBrayer: Yes, well I know from the Kenneth story line is he's dealing with at the end of last season he got fired and so I do get to explore like life after TGS with Tracy Jordan.

And also it's fun to see how some of the other employees, the NBC employees are dealing with my departure. Other than that I think Alec is dealing with his girlfriend being pregnant.

Robert Carlock: Yes, you know we sort of did - last year was about doing a lot of - trying to have some big changes in people's lives and this season's about how those changes affect the show as we know it. And McBrayer didn't take the hand of us from Kenneth.

He's still here. But you know Liz is in this ongoing relationship with this guy Carol, you know Matt Damon's going to be coming back some and Jack's dealing with jumping into a relationship himself.

And Tracy's got some life changes and stuff. I think it's - you know we're picking up all of those threads to answer your question and the fun is seeing how it all kind of reverberates among our usual players.

And also getting to see McBrayer wearing something other than stage costume.

Jack McBrayer: It's jarring. It will frighten you.

Robert Carlock: You don't recognize him. He's beautiful.

How important is social networking to the promotion of this show and keeping its longevity?

Robert Carlock: Oh boy, that's a good question. I mean one of our writers actually maintains fake Twitter feeds for some of the characters, for Tracy and I think Jenna. I don't know how many followers she's managed to round up.

You know there's a - you know in terms of direct sort of social networking, I don't know. Do you know anything McBrayer?

Jack McBrayer: I don't, because I'm pretty ignorant of that thing, I really am. But I do know that you know especially the young fans of the show are definitely rabid on the internet.

So I do know that between the Facebook and the Twitter and stuff we do get some traffic on there. And you know they help us kind of showcase what episodes we have coming up and you know discuss what they just saw.