You can blow up every building in the world, but inevitably the scenes come down to two people talking and what is that about. We love taking incredibly flawed characters and setting them on their way and having them chat about things.

We're basically doing a feature film every week. This is big stuff. We blew up a pizza kid, robbed a moving train, went down into the sewers, robbed a bank, did a chase scene with helicopters over downtown L.A.--and that's just in the pilot!

Household income should be thought of as the canary in the mineshaft; its decline relative to the U.S. cannot be ignored.