Rewind Eureka

Here are Jamie Pagua and Bruce Miller on making changes to the series and to watch for consequences when they do.
“The idea that very small changes can be very meaningful in your life.
Um is really what what we’re dealing with, and you can deal with that for quite a long time, but what you have to keep doing is introducing interesting storylines and interesting problems for them so that you can reflect back on all the little, how the little changes are playing out, what, you know, if Fargo’s the head of GD, that’s funny for a scene, but then when you start to say, OK, well, what does it really mean to have that job when you didn’t. And is there a way you got that job that kind of maybe doesn’t make you feel so good about yourself or what have you.
And so the little, the way the little changes kind of echo.”

Here is Bruce Miller on the fandom:
“It’s amazing to see, you know, because we get a little piece of paper that tell us, you know, 2 million people watched it or this many people downloaded it on iTunes, and then when you actually see those people, it’s, it’s amazing, it’s an amazing feeling. Uh, because we just kind of sit around and try to write what we think is cool, um, and we don’t go, if we can make, you know, if I can make the other 4 writers in the room laugh, that’s as far as it always goes for us.
And then when you realize there’s that many people out there really worried about what’s gonna happen, it’s pretty neat.”

There was a scene I brought up in Cafe Diem, when the cast was sitting around, the act, I mean, the characters were, and they realized they have to make the best of the situation that they can, as they’re kind of trapped.

Bruce Miller: 
“It was always based on character. So when you get into a scene like that, you’re bearing the fruit of the plant the seed that Jamie planted, which is you have all these people who are genuinely interested interesting and have genuine point of views and all, you know, you know, they’re not, they’re not kind of surfacey comic characters. They they’re real people, pretty grounded.
And so when they talk about it, the nice thing is they talk about it and they go through it the way that Jamie and I, if we were. Dinner with our wives would go through something like that. And so even though we’re dealing with concepts that seem kind of heady and crazy, as long as you just say, OK, well what if I was having that discussion?”

That’s why it turns out to be so interesting and the actors really treat it as grounded. They don’t wink and say, Oh, we didn’t travel back in time. They act like they did and it really helps.”

Bruce Miller on the series Visual Effects.

“We do a lot of visual effects on our show. In order to do them well, it takes a very, very long time. And considering the, the, the, the stuff that we can do on our budget is every year quadruples. I mean, 11, I, I was on a lot of, I’ve been on television a long time. I was on ER and one time on ER we had to put in flies in a scene. And I remember the difference between flies and three dimensional flies was like $140,000.And now you know what you can do, you know, you could, you could have each individual fly have a personality if you wanted to now for that amount of money. So it changes dramatically and it changes dramatically every season for us, but we try really hard . A lot of the effects that we do actually are good enough that you don’t know that there are effects. We had our first episode this year was about space, about being in space, and it was all CG and it looks like models. It’s beautiful and and I watched it right because I was trying to compare it to Apollo 13, and it looks better than that. The outside of the ship is more scarred up and it’s just amazing. We scraped the outside of the space station. That was fun. NASA liked that phone call. That was one of the high costs of the series.”