AVC: You’ve said that you guys wrote a bunch of over-the-top jokes into the pilot thinking HBO would cut them—except they didn’t. What were they?

DM: You know, I think it’s just an old trick that we’ve used a lot. Any scripts that I’ve written with David Green or any of these different guys, we’ve always done that: put in some fucked-up shit that we don’t really think would [make it], that we’re not attached to, in the hopes that that’s the obvious stuff they’ll pull out. With this, a lot of that just had to do with the language and just how fucked-up the character is to other people. We would put stuff in there that made us laugh, but we knew it wasn’t anything that was really suitable for a mass audience. Then we’d get the notes back, and that would be the stuff HBO wouldn’t have a problem with. It would be like the really mundane things we would never think they would have a problem with—that’s where they were drawing the line.

AVC: Like what?

DM: Just little things. Like, you can have a guy fucking blowing rails and driving his nephew to school, but if you make an AIDS joke, then you’re out, you’re not allowed to do that. [Laughs.] But HBO has been really, really good about everything. They let us do what we wanted when we were shooting. They let us employ all of our buddies to work on this thing. And all of that has, I think, really helped keep the vision unique. We never really had to water anything down.

AVC: It’s only six episodes long, right?

DM: Yeah, this season is six episodes. We constructed it like a three-hour movie, basically. Every episode locks into the next one; it picks up exactly where the last one left off. If HBO gives us the middle finger and pisses all over us and says they hate this television show, it will stand on its own as its own complete story in one season. But if they wanted to get into bed with us again, we definitely have an idea of where we would take it from where it leaves off.