Q. What did they [Fox] not want?

A. Sex. They want things to be sexy, but for God’s sake, they don’t want them to be sexual. And one of the things that Eliza [Dushku] and I first talked about was sex. This was going to be about human need and when I talk about perversion, perversion for me is something to be celebrated. As long as nobody’s getting hurt. Because obsession is the thing in us that makes us not everybody else.

Q. Was there a particularly deviant episode they didn’t like?

A. Absolutely. It would have been deviant-tastic. The episode worked on two tracks: one with this nice old man, and something has gone horribly wrong. And then the  denouement was that the old man wanted to hear his daughter say that she didn’t kill herself because he molested her. He wanted to be forgiven for something that he shouldn’t be forgiven for. And the other was this creepy reclusive billionaire with real dolls, who’s completely incapable of human relationships but was trying to take a tiny step toward them by getting rid of these dolls. Even though he was very twisted, what he was trying to do was beautiful. That episode would never be made. They were like, “No sex, just shoot at people.”