This was a pitch presentation that I made on spec in order to convince FOX that “The Paloni Family” would be the ideal late night show for their saturday night block. It was 2009, and they had just cancelled Mad TV and there was a perfect little slice of heaven that I was hoping to turn into my playground. I brought this in, and was able to sell them on it. We started moving forward with this as late night for a few weeks, when suddenly, BOOM. The president of FOX (Kevin Reilly) shifted gears on the animated idea for that Saturday night slot. He still loved this project, and decided that it was strong enough/ interesting enough to be developed for prime time. So that’s what we did. And the original idea began to buckle once subjected to the scrutiny of the prime time development process.

The Paloni “packaging” was supposed to be a really simple narrative that took up at most 25% of the total episode. Instead we ended up writing a pilot script that was about 9...