With 'Always Be My Maybe,' this has to be funny; this has to be entertaining. And then, when we stop for these moments with the characters that are emotional, you kind of feel it more because it's a little bit unexpected.
I personally feel like the end product is always better when you can make a collective. It's like a band. You can have a bunch of individual great musicians, but when you come together, there's a sound that it creates that you couldn't do on your own.
In terms of leadership, you've got to allow for people to be amazing and to contribute in a way that's meaningful. You can't hold on so tight that people don't get a chance to do what they do best.
In comedy, it's so subjective; there is no right or wrong.
The family sitcom has been around forever, since the advent of television. I don't need to reinvent it. But if you take something and you do it in a way that you haven't necessarily seen before, that's right where I live.
Stuff starts to feel stale comedically when you're just rehashing things, so putting together a writers' room where the majority is made up of people who have not been the focus of the story, it flips everything around.
Cable shows do 13 episodes. I get that. I can wrap my head around 13 episodes. You make them all, you post them all, and then you get to air them. The network cycle is way more intense. There's more episodes.
Women behaving badly has always been funny, to me personally, so I knew I wanted to do something like that.
Randall Park and Ali Wong, they are so many things; they're not just one thing, they're bigger than just their identity.
Working in network sitcom arenas, whenever you decide to depart from the norm and tell a story that's not typical, I think you're always a little bit nervous.
Norman Lear was talking about everything in the '70s... race, sexism, all of it. The network comedy really stayed away from that in the 1980s and 1990s.
'Seinfeld' was an amazing show. It's iconic and defined a whole generation of comedy writers - but by their own admission, that show was about nothing.
If you want to be a writer, you have to learn to write in other people's voices until you get the chance to write in your own.
Not to say that I saw myself in the Iron Sheik, but our whole family would gather around the TV on Saturday and watch the Iron Sheik wrestle. And he was the bad guy, so everyone else was booing him and cheering whoever he was fighting - it was the opposite in our house.
I'm not Chinese, but both of my parents were born in Iran; my brother and I were the first ones born here. First in our family to go to college, that whole thing.
When you're writing a pilot, unless you already have an actor attached to the project, you're writing it with all the voices sort of in your head. Once you actually cast it, the actors become the voices of the characters, and you start to write for them and their strengths.
'Modern Family' is unique in that it's telling the story of three different families, which is a huge amount of characters to service.
The idea of dealing with success is always interesting to us: You spend so long struggling to make good, and then what happens when you finally do?
I grew up watching television as a kid. It was always something I wanted to pursue.
The first time I ever wrote anything, it was an editorial column for my high school newspaper.
