The Daily Beast: How critical was it that the Henricksons were exposed now? Does this change some of the central conceits of the series?

Mark V. Olsen: Absolutely. We felt the need for that kind of game-changer and needed to move beyond the hiding. We were ready to do it at the end of the first year, when Barb was exposed at the governor's mansion… We said, "OK, they're outed. This is our new story for the [second] season." We got some very terrified looks from our collaborators, who were suggesting [we] might want to rethink that a bit, and we did. Nevertheless, we knew this day was coming in the history of the show, and we wanted it to be this year.

Will Scheffer: I think we've gotten hit by some critics about the bigness of the storylines and the speed of things growing this year. But… in order to get [the family] to that place at the end of the season, we wanted to move with that speed and that operatic quality... We've always been ones for not worrying that we were changing the tone and the feeling of the show every year.

The Daily Beast: There were only nine episodes this season. Do you think that if you had that 10th episode, there would have been more breathing room?

Olsen: I do think we wanted a kind of breathless approach to this season where we had some strong movement. But, it's true that when the order date went down to nine [episodes] for scheduling reasons, we had to compress some things at the end.

The Daily Beast: Is there hope for Barb and Bill to salvage their marriage, given Barb's decision to get up on stage with Bill, Margene, and Nicki?

Olsen: In that moment, it's a little bit of solidarity with the women. She just doesn't know what that future is going to hold for her, and it's still the lingering vestiges of [her being] disappointed by a lot of the things that Bill has done this year. She does say, "I don't know if I need you anymore." But, she doesn't say, "I don't know if I love you anymore." She still loves these people. She's just really torn.

The Daily Beast: At any point in the planning of the season did you consider just using the casino storyline or just Bill's political campaign?

Olsen: We knew we wanted Bill running for office and it leading to their ultimate exposure [and] to play the casino story with a Sissy Spacek-type as our scaled-back version of Jack Abramoff. Because, although we had this exciting franchise of Indian Tribal Casino, what in the hell do you do with it? We thought we could get those two stories to speak to each other. As post-mortem, I think we're still looking at it going, hmm, could we have done it better? Should they have been independent? I don't know how we finally feel about that in the final analysis.

The Daily Beast: Bill says in the finale that the family has gone off the tracks. Has Bill lost his way or is he the only one that has a clear vision of where he wants this family to be going?

Olsen: I think he still has a clear vision of the direction that he's intended to lead this family… In the pursuit of that, he kind of got carried away and screwed up, hurt those he loved, and was not vigilant of the needs and welfare of his business partner Don [Joel McKinnon Miller]. He sees that he cut corners.

Scheffer: The question for next year is: What does a visionary do when the rubber meets the road? When the world meets that visionary, what is the fallout in that regard?

The Daily Beast: Where was the moment in the season where Nicki realized that she loves Bill?

Olsen: I think it actually started to begin in Washington, D.C. in the third episode, in that final scene where Bill is saying that Cara Lynn (Cassi Thomson)'s going to be OK… and Nicki is protesting, saying, "No, I want her to have a better life. I want her to have more than me." Bill says, "But honey, you've had a good life. You're doing OK," and Nicki shakes her head and says, "No. No, I'm not." […] But it's the beginning of that change of force for her.

There is that moment in Episode 8 where… Nicki says, "Well, I'm along for the ride because I love Bill." She blurts it out and… she shocked herself that she said that… It scares her so much, she jumps up and runs out of the room. Organically, it just kind of popped out.

The Daily Beast: What should we be making of that scene with Margene, Ana, and Goran embracing? Where do you hope to take their relationship?

Olsen: We're asking ourselves that as well. We did a couple of trims to that scene… After that group hug, we see Goran's hands slide up and down her back and rest on her butt and we see Margie registering that and, in a very Jules et Jim kind of way, looks to Goran, to Ana, then back to Goran. You just say, oh, my God, they're moments away from a three-way. We were going a little fast [so we decided to] just slow that down a bit. But we want to explore it… what marriage and love means to Margene and I think it's very different than what it means to any other Henrickson.

The Daily Beast: How difficult was it to say goodbye to Sarah (Amanda Seyfried)?

Olsen: It became a much less difficult moment when we realized that Amanda is very happy to come back and do some [guest starring] next year… But, yes, it's tough to lose that voice… It's not just that she provided that narrative beat of looking in on the family with those wide, skeptical eyes, but she had deep and rich relationships with every character on that show, certainly with Barb and Bill. It's a tough emotional vacuum.

The Daily Beast: With Alby's destruction of Roman's office, his grief over the death of Dale (Ben Koldyke), and his punishment of Lura (Anne Dudek), are we seeing the birth of a new and even darker prophet in Alby?

Olsen: That's exactly what you're seeing.

Scheffer: We felt that he had risked love with Dale and when he lost Dale, he was turning his back on love. It's kind of the Darth Vader story in a way. He was really embracing the dark side at that point and there's no going back for him.

The Daily Beast: Were you concerned at all about how the audience might react to the incest storyline?

Olsen: There are three or four main branches of fundamentalist polygamists here in the state of Utah. The Kingston family… there's about 2,000 of them, and they've been practicing inbreeding since the 1930s. We knew we wanted to go there [since we wrote the pilot]. Once we landed Zeljko Ivanek as Nicki's ex-husband [JJ], we thought, here's our guy who's going to take us there. Were we aware of the difficulty of the subject matter for an audience? You bet we were. I was the canary in the coalmine on that one. Will was more the fearless leader of let's go there, let's just do it. I'm, like, you know how disgusting this is? Televisions across America are going to be clicking off.

Scheffer: It made it really difficult to play and I think we all felt like we had to withhold it until the last possible moment. It was alienating to us, so we felt it would alienate an audience.

Olsen: Yet, it's so appropriate for the show… It does fit within the themes of what we're looking at, which is family and creation of family and definition of family. It's out there, but it's part of that discussion.

The Daily Beast: Looking ahead, what's next for the Henricksons?

Olsen: I don't think they're going to be greeted by the state of Utah with open arms now as public polygamists. That's not to send a message that next season's going to be a downer, because it won't be. We already have some stories that are a lot of fun. But I think there's going to be some retrenchment.

Scheffer: We do like to surprise people… The "out" nature of the family has to be explored as obviously that was the game changer and we're excited for that. They're not going to be greeted well, and that's kind of the main thing. The family is certainly going to have to go through a major readjustment with how far we push them.

The Daily Beast: For many viewers, this was a contentious season. Do you feel that you succeeded in telling the story that you set out to tell? Was there added pressure from the success of Season 3 to top that?

Olsen: We accomplished what we set out to do in the writers room, which was bringing the family to a new place on two levels: changing the series paradigm about hiding versus being exposed and… trying to take the kid gloves off of some of Bill's patriarchy and the way in which he may or may not dominate the wives and letting it get a little bit rougher in the family… If we're always pulling punches and, at the end of the day, they're always sitting down at that table to break bread and share a good time, it just becomes a formula.

Did we feel an obligation to up the ante over last year? …We want to think that there's more to do, that we have more to learn, and that we can become better at what we do… But that doesn't necessarily imply what people think it does… that that's the reason the show accelerated so much this year, that [we] were trying to do last year's stories squared.... That was not it at all.

Scheffer: It's something we talk about every year. How can we be better than the year before? What risks can we take that don't make us fall into this complacency with where we are? We're ambitious with those kind of artistic challenges.

Olsen: When we ask that question, "How can we be better?" we don't assume that the answer lies in being bigger, faster, or more. That is so not what this season was about for us.

Scheffer: We hope the finale snaps things into place a little bit and people are more like apt to say, oh, I understand what they were going for now. But next year will be a different year, that's for sure.

Olsen: Next year will be bigger, faster, better.

The Daily Beast: What was behind the decision to change the credit sequence for Season 4 from the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” to this? Do you think it better reflected the emotional state of the Henricksons this season?

Mark V. Olsen: I think so, but in an unplanned way. I have wanted to deep-six our opening credits for about two years. I felt like it got us out of the gate. Some people didn’t even know that it’s the parable of the Mormon religion: the belief in the afterlife and going to your planet with your multiple wives. Some people think it’s just this lovely little ice-skating in the desert with some veils thrown in. I felt like we moved beyond that… [and] the tone of the show was heading in a different direction. We wanted to do something other than a polemic on Mormon theology in our opening credits. It was really quite fortuitous that HBO had scheduled the publicity shoot for this season, and we watched that footage. It was like, oh my God, this is so elegant and so beautiful. Is there any chance folks that we could jump horses mid-stream and convert something like this into our [credits]? …We didn’t know that we would have a quote in that opening credit sequence, “hold tight,” which was our promo campaign, [that would connect to] that final image at the state house, with the four of them standing up there holding hands. But it did turn out that way.

Will Scheffer: We felt like [the actors] had grown and they deserved to be seen as they’ve matured. Their faces as they are now, we really wanted to show that. A lot of title sequences don’t show the actors, and ours did. We felt we needed to reflect that.

The Daily Beast: What happened to Bill’s church from the beginning of the season? Did it fall by the wayside after his testimony pushed him to pursue a political office?

Scheffer: I remember talking about this while in the writers room, about his testimony to have an action that made a difference in the world, that took him into the world and not into the insularity of a church, or that kind of messianic or missionary kind of world. Faith in action was… in his DNA in a way. He could have headed towards the prophethood or towards being the head of a church, but he had this need to put things to action, especially out of what was going on with polygamy in the larger picture this year.

Olsen: Even though we share duties in the writers room, I have a completely different point of view than Will on this one. Although he is quite right, we did talk about that in the writers room, my rationale is very different. There were certain plausibility issues that needed to be nailed down about Bill Henrickson running for office... Within the context of that discussion, it seemed obvious to me that, even though it’s a very short run—a stealth campaign that only covers about four weeks in real time on the ground, because it’s a special election to replace a deceased member of the Senate—it would not behoove him to be meeting with a group of polygamists in a neighborhood church over the course of those four weeks. We attempted to address that in episode 5, where there’s a brief moment with Joey… as Bill is awaiting his fortune. Joey is really skeptical about all of Bill’s activities in this regard and asked him, “So hey, what’s up with that church you founded, big brother?” Bill just said, “I had to put it aside for the time being."

The Daily Beast: Will we ever see him go back to that church? Do you plan to address that?

Olsen: Now that the pressure is off him, absolutely.

The Daily Beast: Is Sissy Spacek’s arc on the show finished?

Olsen: At a minimum, we will be referencing [Marilyn] next season. Her involvement in that casino and the scale of what she did in terms of her criminality is such that I think it at least has to be addressed next season.

The Daily Beast: Was it Jerry or Tommy Flute who sold the Henricksons out to Marilyn?

Olsen: Tommy… In the interest of making this finale manageable, we cut [two scenes], but he was the one who did it. There was one final Barb [Jeanne Tripplehorn]/Tommy scene, but it was absolutely impossible to get it to play when all of a sudden we’re in the midst of everything that’s happening up at JJ’s Dr. Mengele House of Horrors, so we [couldn’t] cut to Barb and Tommy sharing a few painful words with one another... But it was Tommy.

The Daily Beast: Will the Flutes return?

Olsen: I don’t know. We’re taking a good long look at that… Will rightfully pointed out, don’t forget Marilyn’s line of dialogue, “Tommy and Jerry Flute might hate me, but boy do they hate you more.” I [thought], well, that’s an interesting dynamic to consider playing: what happens if your partners in this tribal casino despise you and you’re all stuck in bed? We don’t have an answer for that one just yet.

The Daily Beast: What was JJ’s plan for Joey?

Olsen: Joey was a card for JJ to play. Joey was a piece of insurance for JJ to take out. I think JJ was feeling his way along with what could he do with this card. How would he play this card? When was the time right to play that card? We never got to the point in the storyline where we felt the need to declare that moment where JJ was going to pull the Joey trigger, as it were.

Scheffer: I think that JJ’s character thought that he might need to play that card if Bill pursued the prophethood—

Olsen: Or pursued Kansas and what JJ had going on there.

Scheffer: There was a more personal reason, which was evident in the last episode where he says to Nicki, “I’m so glad you came back and we’re finally reunited,” which was his more personal feelings he had for Nicki, which may have [forced] him to take out Bill for these more Shakespearean reasons of a personal nature with his love for Nicki.

The Daily Beast: What happened to Joey in Mexico after the kidnapping? Why didn’t he come back with the others?

Scheffer: We talked about this a lot, whether we wanted to bring him back and play out what he would do at this moment with finding Wanda mute and deal with the fallout from his admission that he killed Roman Grant (Harry Dean Stanton). I think we again felt like we had so many stories hurdling to their conclusion that it almost felt like a new story.

Olsen: We had Joey plotted out for the last three episodes to make good on his alliance with JJ. We had some great scenes where he showed up at the house demanding that they turn Wanda back over to him. We had a great brother reckoning… We were going to toy with the idea that Joey might even have a “kill Bill” moment or close to it. This is one of those moments, one of those pieces that was hurt by the loss of that tenth episode, because we just couldn’t carry it. So, we thought, okay, we’ll pick it up next year, but we need to park this one because it will be one too many balls in the air.

The Daily Beast: Does Adaleen (Mary Kay Place)’s murder of JJ and Malinda (Melinda Page Hamilton) create a positive situation for Cara Lynn (Cassi Thomson) in that she can now stay with the Henricksons? They’re dead, right?

Olsen: They’re definitely dead. I think Cara Lynn has this kind of horrific history that she was in a way sheltered from [the world] and it does enable her to make a break from it. That was an important consideration for us, that she kind of be free from this stain.

The Daily Beast: Adaleen is now pregnant with the biological child of siblings JJ and Wanda (Melora Walters). Will the unborn child be sticking around?

Olsen: I think that child is going to be sticking around… I think it’s fairly safe to say we’re coming back three calendar months later. We’re actually going to try and pull off doing winter on our show and we’ll be coming back roughly with a timeline set in January. Adaleen will only be three, four months pregnant… I fully expect that woman to keep that baby.

The Daily Beast: Is there any truth to reports that you had met with Macaulay Culkin about possibly joining the cast?

Olsen: Well, we didn’t really meet. He came up to the set one day with Chloë [Sevigny]. She introduced him and we liked him.

Scheffer: We like him enormously and we thought, oh, my God, he’s an actor that could fit into the world of our show in a lot of different ways. I think we expressed how much we liked him and that got blown out of proportion into [a rumor that] he’s going to be on Big Love.

Olsen: Sometimes these things that get blown out of the water do become self-fulfilling prophecies. We have been [thinking] over the last couple of weeks about this thing that tumbled out into the press. Is there any merit to it, Will? Is this something we want to consider? We’re game, we’re open… But, it certainly wasn’t some pre-designed plan.

Scheffer: We have to go into the writers room in a week and a half and discuss that because it hasn’t happened yet, that’s for sure.

The Daily Beast: How happy was Chloë Sevigny to ditch Nicki’s prairie clothes this season?

Scheffer: Well, I don’t know. She’s always said that she likes playing in them… I felt like, by the end, her character was confused what to do. Almost like she had overstepped, she had gone too far by giving up her prairie dress. She had lost her bearing in a way, and she didn’t know who she was.

Olsen: I think we’re going to try and find some middle ground between prairie dress and flouncing around like a cocktail waitress.

The Daily Beast: So, no more side ponytail?

Olsen: Well, I don’t know. A girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do.

Reading the interview, anyone think that Albie might be set up as a Jim Jones type character?