Was Rockne very hands on?
It varied as the series went on. The whole thing evolved – the first season the writers were mainly here in the US and sending pages down to Australia, and Rockne and David would be back and forth. Even toward the end of the year I was back and forth to Australia in season one.
I've done that on other shows and generally it works better if all the writers are down there with the production. It's more fun, you get more immediate feedback, the actors can come into your office and complain about lines and it's just simpler. Besides the fact that there's a seventeen hour time difference, which makes phone calls a little bit tricky when the writers are in one place and the show is in the other place.
So come season two it was decided that we were all going to be down in Australia all together working on it, which was a terrible hardship because Sydney is just a horrible place to work and I miss it! Rock decided not to come down to Sydney so he stayed up here [in L.A.] and helped us out with some scripts and rewrites and things like that.