Champion of the 'Sunny'

Obviously you're scripting every episode, but how much of what we end up seeing is actually improv?
We write very specifically the scripts for all the episodes, so everything is scripted and beated out over and over and over again. On the day we'll generally do one or two takes of a scene as scripted, and then we'll play with it and see if anything develops. Anything we don't think is funny we'll cut and anything we do think is funny we'll harp on and run with it. There are some scenes that are word-for-word exactly the way they were written in the script, and there are other scenes that we wind up changing completely not only on the day but in the editing room and you realize it's not even about what it used to be about.

So the main cast is coming back. Let's talk about the supporting cast. Who's coming back?
We love the waitress [Mary Elizabeth Ellis], obviously. That character is just so funny. Having this character who's madly in love with Dennis and he hates her. Charlie is madly in love with her [but she hates him]. Frank has had sex with her. And Dee and the waitress are pseudo-friends, but not really. We thought it might be a good opportunity for Mac to start dating her and have it really working out. Rickety Cricket will be back, too.

He's a writer on the show, right?
He is. David Hornsby's a writer, and producer on the show as well. He's been a friend of ours for years. The McPoyle brothers will be back, of course, at some point.

If Mac is going to start dating the waitress, does that mean Brittany Daniel's character, a pre-op male-to-female transvestite, may not show up again?
You never know. She might show up post-op. And Mac might be really into it and she might finally realize he's a degenerate and drop him completely.

Any guest stars lined up?
I'm really keeping my fingers crossed that we can get somebody [from a] show like The Hills or Laguna Beach or Tila Tequila. Somebody of that caliber would really raise the bar. Shooting for the moon, baby!

What do you have planned for Danny DeVito's character?
We really want Frank degenerating even further. We see our characters not really changing over the course of the entire series, but he drops one rung lower on the ladder each week. By the end of it he's just going to be a puddle of goo.

A co-worker of mine is trying to get together a collection of all the slogan t-shirts that you've worn on the show. She has ''I Rock'' and ''Come to Philly for the Crack.'' She wants to know where you got, ''What are you looking at D--knose.''
We had our wardrobe department make it. The reason is the director of that episode is a guy named Jerry Levine. He directed our first bloc of episodes last year. And he played Stiles in the movie Teen Wolf. In the movie, Stiles wears a t-shirt that says, ''What are you looking at D--knose,'' with no question mark, just like a statement, which made no sense to me. So when we were trying to come up with a t-shirt idea for me to wear with my sleeves cut off, knowing that Jerry was going to direct the episode, we thought it'd be good to put that slogan on there.

The thing fans are wondering most is when's the season 3 DVD going to come out?
We're working on that now. We're putting as many extras and special features as we possibly can because, as fans of other shows and movies, we really respect and love when we buy a DVD — and are shelling out a fair amount of money — that there's a lot of extras on there that really differentiates it from what you can get on iTunes or your DVR. The season 3 DVD is going to have stuff you can't get anywhere else. We want to spend a lot of time working on that. My guess is it'll be out sometime in the fall, around when [the new season of] Sunny comes out.