What qualities did you look for in casting the Los Angeles group?

Well, we really felt it was important to find people who were as far from the Amish as possible. Otherwise what would the point be? It's no accident that there's a vegan in the house and you've got people [the Amish] who were raised in the dairy industry. It's no accident that there's a gay guy and the Amish are people who have not been exposed to gay people. It's no accident that there's an African-American woman from the inner city, because that's a very different experience, and yet, she says at one point, "I'm an Amish person myself," because she's being exposed to brand-new experiences just like the Amish people are. And in last week's episode, she took the other kids in the house to visit with her family, and that's one of my absolute favorite scenes in the entire series.

We wanted to challenge the Amish kids and basically let them know that if they live in the city, they have to be able to get along and interact with all kinds of people. We didn't want to sugarcoat it; we wanted it to be part of the light side and dark side of city life. The light side is that there are all these opportunities; there are things you can do. The dark side is, there are pressures, there's crime, there are all these different things. In this case, there are people you get along with who are fascinating, who stimulate you, and there are people who make you crazy.

Having grown up in a similar way, what do you think are the advantages to being raised without modern technologies?

For me, my life growing up that way was really about reading a lot, personal interaction ... We had to entertain ourselves, so the kinds of entertainment you would have would be very human-based.

That sounds like the way I grew up! My mom didn't get us many toys, and we had a really awful black-and-white TV for 15 years. I still watched it, of course.

There's this wonderful Swedish commune movie where the hippie kid goes to see the city kid, and the city kid has LEGOs and he says, "Wow, I'd like LEGOs," and the city kid says, "You don't have LEGOs?" And the hippie kid says, "My dad was going to make me a set but he only made three." I can relate to that, because all the adults would say, "You guys can entertain yourselves. You live in the country! There's lots of things you can do." And we're going, "Yeah, like what?" So it was all personal interaction and human dynamics and literature as opposed to TV, telephone and electronic stimulation. And in fact, I still think that I have less of that kind of thing -- well, I certainly have plenty of TV -- but I still read a lot, I still need peace and quiet time, I still do yoga, I still do some things that sort of keep me grounded in that spirituality, even though I'm now feeding the television machine.

And what do you think of the disadvantages? Did you see anything about the Amish kids that you thought was really a shame?

Well, certainly one of the aspects of Amish life that's highly controversial is their view on education, which is simply that kids go up until the eighth grade, and then that's it, and they're taught by people who've only gone up to the eighth grade. I'm a big believer in education and that's something that's very difficult, to see people who were really not given that kind of encouragement. The feeling is, if you're going to stay in the Amish community you don't need more than an eighth-grade education because of the things that you're going to spend your life doing. But that's one of the things that make people go back to the church. More education leads to more information leads to more curiosity.

But how educated are the other kids, even though they may have finished high school and college? It depends largely on a kid's attention span and the culture he or she grew up in.

Well, there's an arc on the show in which education takes a front and center role, and I think it's going to be very fascinating to see how it evolves, as one of the characters starts on a journey that's one of the most memorable aspects of the series.

What other kinds of shows are you interested in creating?

I think that anything that gets people talking in an interesting and provocative way is good, provided it's not just steeped in negativity. I think that exploring issues of spirituality is really interesting -- I think that's an interesting aspect of "Amish in the City." Something I love to get into, if it could be done in the right way, is exploring issues related to race and racial relations. I think that's something we've come a long way with and we can go a lot further. I've talked to a couple of people about shows that could get into that, but it's gotta be the right show and handled in the right way.

Yeah, there's always the token black guy, but you never get a chance to see six blacks and six whites in a house.

I've certainly been to the pitch meeting where that's been suggested, and I'm not willing to do it unless it's done in the proper way. "Amish in the City" only made sense because everyone involved was committed to making the show that you see, and I'll stand by that show. I don't want to do a show that deals with something as delicate as race relations unless it's done in a similar way and I feel like I can stand behind it.

I'd also love to take unscripted shows to a different epic scale, so that they could start to attract people who might tune in to a television miniseries or a dramatic series, and not just a reality show audience. I think that "The Amazing Race" and "Survivor" certainly get close to that. But we've been working on an unscripted series that's based on "The Odyssey" and that's really exciting, because the scope and scale of it are so off the map for anything that's ever been done.

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