Did you worry about making Veronica believable in the early stages of writing the show?

Yeah, particularly as a private detective. I didn't want to give her any sort of superpowers, any things that I didn't believe she could possess. I started with this notion that her dad was out trying to make a living, but he's got one too many cases, so he tells Veronica, "Just sit right here, and take a picture of whoever comes out of that room." And that's how it starts. And because she's such a pariah at school, she doesn't have friends, she's only close to this one person in her life, she just starts hanging out at the detective agency and she just picks things up and picks things up and becomes valuable to her father there. There's a bit of a buy -- you wonder when she's doing her homework and other things -- but I wanted to make it as believable as possible. Most of the back story is there in order to create a world in which you believe this 17-year-old girl hangs out at her dad's job and learns the real tricks of this trade.

The nice thing about Kristen Bell is that she sells it so well. It's easy to buy that she's confident enough to reject high school and pursue these other, absurdly ambitious extracurricular activities.

Yeah, and the show wouldn't work if you didn't buy that. As proud as I am of that pilot script, if we hadn't cast it well, it would've flopped. We never would've gotten ordered if it hadn't worked as well as it did with her.

Enrico Colantoni in particular is a really interesting choice, and maybe the strangest, most original dad ever cast on a teen show. How did you decide that he was right for the role?

What I think Rico does is, he gives you a different line reading than you expect. I remember seeing Rico years and years ago on a sitcom called "Hope & Glory," when it first came out. It wasn't by any means my favorite sitcom, but -- and this was before I was in the business, this was when I was a high school teacher in Texas -- watching the show, I remember thinking, Wow, who is that? He's really good.

There's really a lot of humor on the show. How conscious of a choice is that?

That was a struggle, because it's such a weird balance on the show. I think my favorite description on the show was by the Village Voice, who called us the first show to ever try to blend "Heathers" and "Chinatown." And that's pretty dead-on. The dialogue on the show is pretty stylized. I adored "Freaks & Geeks," and that's a show where the dialogue is not stylized, where those kids sound absolutely like teenagers all the time. They were never allowed to say anything pithier or wordier or more out-there than you'd expect a 16- or 17-year-old to say. We give it a little more freedom in terms of, OK, we're going to give Veronica the line that, if you had a day to think about it, you would get.

But when you have a murder in the backdrop, a rape in the backdrop, a missing mother in the backdrop ... I was nervous about tone and how well we could blend the comedy and the wordiness with the real sort of drama at its core. It's a learning process. I ended up cutting a lot of lines out of the pilot that I just felt like were too self-conscious, too much an attempt to go for the joke, so much that it took away from scenes.

It almost seems like there's more comedy in the show as you become more comfortable with the fact that the tone works. Did you hire comedy writers at all?

None of the writers here have ever worked on a half-hour [i.e., a comedy] before, but that said, when I read scripts, I was looking for funny drama writers. It's kind of the school that I come out of, having done "Cupid." I like the rhythm of comedy in dramas, if that makes sense. In other words, I don't want to write setup, punch, setup, punch, where the joke dictates the scene, I want to find comedy in which the drama is actually driving the moment in the scene.

Are you a big fan of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"?

I didn't watch a lot of "Buffy." I have so many friends who I respect who love "Buffy," and when I would watch "Buffy," I always thought, Oh, there's a well-written show! But I just never got into it and followed the mythology. I would catch an episode here and an episode there. But I knew, certainly, going into this that it would be the show that we would be compared to most, and it was a comparison that I welcomed. "Buffy," in town, among writers, is a show that writers wanted to be on. It was a show where you got to be smart and fun. A good friend of mine was one of the executive producers, and I actually call her for info on writers all the time.

But no, I've probably seen six or seven "Buffys" in my life.

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