One of the best pieces of news I've received in 2026 is when I found out you're in L.A., writing for a TV show. How are you finding the city of angels since you last resided here?

Aw man thanks! Very exciting opportunity. I've never written for a narrative show before and it's the rare dream where the reality has lived up to (exceeded?) my expectations. Re: LA, I'm working and also living in Valley, and I've never lived in the Valley. I like it except for — in what I read as a negative confluence of AI and production moving out of the LA metro area — there are a bunch of specialty prop warehouses with FOR LEASE signs hanging on them. Bums me out to drive by a squat stucco-clad extremely 60s looking building with a sun-bleached sign that says, like, AEROSPACE PROPS or MEDICAL PROPS and it's closed. We just had whole physical worlds on standby here the whole time. Should have appreciated it more. 

With the Mystery Team blu-ray's release earlier this year,  I've been revisiting some Derrick Comedy sketches. Many of them are still crack me up and are classic examples of sketch comedy, such as Funny. How do you find that your background in sketch comedy informs your work now? 

That's nice of you! Later in our time as a group the sketches were usually emerging from improv or just bits, but that one dates back to when we were filming sketches we had first done on stage with our college group Hammerkatz and was a solo Donald effort. I think it was actually in my first show my Freshman year. My dad came! On stage instead of arsenic it was scorpions. (Fun sentence in or out of context.) Anyway: backstory you didn't ask for. 

Narrative and sketch are oil and water in a lot of ways, which is something I yammer on about when teaching sketch comedy (to way oversimplify: stories are about things changing and sketch is about things getting more and more That Way in unexpected and increasingly heightened ways), but one way sketch has informed my narrative writing is, I think I'm pretty good at weaving patterns through things or engineering callbacks, and those are muscles you really overdevelop in sketch and improv. 

I'm gonna steal something from Nate Silver's podcast and ask for three books you'd recommend.

Oh wow the highest pressure question possible. I ate shit in terms of reading last year, admittedly, but these have been some go-to recs of mine for a little or a long while, because they rule:

Same Bed, Different Dreams - Ed Park - I don't always love sprawling multiple-interrelated-timeline fiction, but this is sprawling multiple-interrelated-timeline fiction done super duper right. It weaves a conspiratorial alternate history through 20th century Korea, pulp sci-fi novels, and the Buffalo Sabres hockey team in a way that makes you feel like you are in on the conspiracy. Among the many things it is, and like most good things, it's funny.

Ruth - Kate Riley - Okay full disclosure I know Kate personally, but her first novel came out last year and I found myself amazed that I know someone that can write, on a pure sentence-to-sentence level, like that. It chronicles the interior life of a woman born into an Anabaptist commune and might also contradict the thing I said earlier about sketch vs stories, because it is not so much about someone changing as it is about a person getting more and more That Way, largely because they are in an environment that refuses to really change or allow them to grow inside or outside of it. It's also frequently very funny, often sad, and you feel like you are hopping from lily pad to lily pad of beautifully constructed sentences the whole time.

Addiction By Design: Machine Gambling In Las Vegas - Natascha Schull - If you are someone that, like me, needs to have read a non-fiction book in the past six months that they can obsessively bring up in every conversation, this is a great choice. It's about casino design and more specifically about video slot machines, but it relates to an insane degree to social media, the algorithm, and everything. Haven't heard it put better than by Hayes Davenport who recommended it by saying something like, "we basically just want to look at screens until we die, and no one knows what to do about it."