After the cast had been chosen, Miller and Boyett asked Chris Thompson, one of the writer-producers of "Laverne & Shirley", to write the pilot and be the series showrunner. Thompson (who would go on to executive-produce such shows as "The Larry Sanders Show") said later that he took the job purely for the money, but unexpectedly found it to be "my completely favorite experience in show business", because the network left him and his young cast free to experiment. "We were left alone," he recalled. "Nobody was paying attention to us. We were all really young, but it was like we had daddy's Porsche. We had $500,000 to play with every week."