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As I slowly managed to take what I had learned into a transition from contestant to announcer and warm-up, I first had to prove myself on pilots. And as you know, many pilots are taped for each show that is lucky enough to breakthrough to being a series.

Networks can typically invest tens of millions of dollars in the development of a pilot. And if they put the show on the air and it fails, that's all lost money. There's no monetization of a broken series.

The pilot is a sales tool; it introduces you to the characters and might set the template for what the show is meant to be, but there's so many boxes you have to check off on a pilot that it can sort of hurt the storytelling in a way.

Pilots are so hard because you have to introduce all these characters, you have to hook an audience, and an audience has such a smaller attention span than maybe they used to have.

The first season of a show is kind of like an extended pilot. You're only really on the map if it goes a second season.

There was so long from when we did the pilot and then when the show was eventually picked up by Comedy Central - and, in fact, we had to shoot the pilot twice.

At the end of the day, it's really, really difficult to make a brand-new show, to write a pilot where you have to introduce characters and everyone has to kind of be dynamic and have something different for themselves.

Everyone loves each other for the pilot. But once you start to do the show, you see everybody's true colors. If it's successful, people start to change, and then if it's not doing well, people start to change in other ways.

The second episode of any new show can be tough. You have about a week to top the well-crafted and polished pilot episode that was written over six months.

Networks are reluctant to take a chance. They put on shows that they know will work on some level, but to get the innovative show, it's very difficult.