Credit: Evans Vestal Ward/USA Network

Question: Lennon, your character looks extremely pregnant in the pilot. Will the baby make an appearance in the first season?

Lennon Parham: Yes.

Jessica St. Clair: Yes.

Lennon Parham: I was actually pregnant when we shot the pilot. I was actually eight months pregnant. That's a real baby that lives with me now.

Jessica St. Clair: Yeah. And I was secretly three months pregnant in this pilot.

Lennon Parham: Yeah.

Jessica St. Clair: We were both smuggling babies.

Lennon Parham: It was a real situation, a perfect storm for comedy. But yes, in episode nine the baby will be delivered. And then episode 10, you find us with a 6 week old and all of the insanity that comes with being a new mom.

Jessica St. Clair: Right. So basically we kind of had a decision to make in the writers' room whether or not we were going to have the baby right away and then see what life is like after, but we found that there was a lot of fun to be had with her being pregnant.

Lennon Parham: Just kind of going on these awesome adventures, and all the stakes get really heightened when you're pregnant.

Jessica St. Clair: Yeah.

Lennon Parham: Like, skinny dipping takes a new label.

Jessica St. Clair: Yeah, we break into a Jewish community center pool. We get arrested. That kind of thing. You know, the normal things you do when your 8-1/2 months pregnant.

Credit: Neil Jacobs/USA Network

Question: Do you two have a natural chemistry together? Is this something you discovered along the way or worked on?

Jessica St. Clair: Well, we are actually real-life best friends.

Lennon Parham: Yeah.

Jessica St. Clair: The way we write is we improvise. We play all the parts. It's so weird to watch.

Lennon Parham: And we record ourselves.

Jessica St. Clair: Yeah, like we're insane people. Usually we're also in our pajamas. We tape record it, and then we transcribe it. That becomes the transcript for the first draft.

Lennon Parham: Jess and I are from the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York, so we came up with improvisation training first. So we're performers first, then writers. That's just how we kind of get into making it sound like we really sound.

Jessica St. Clair: Right. Also, we're terrified -- see how you guys are looking at a computer. That fills me with a dread that I can't even...

Lennon Parham: An empty page.

Jessica St. Clair: ...type. I make Lennon type. I sit literally...

Lennon Parham: Sits right on top of me.

Jessica St. Clair: ...on top of her, and I go, "Go up. Go up."

Lennon Parham: Eating raw nuts. Hot nut breath in my face all the time. Then I'm just typing smart keys, you know.

Jessica St. Clair: Can you imagine that?

Credit: Neil Jacobs/USA Network

Question: Because you're close friends and you work together, who is it that says, "This doesn't work?" Is there somebody from outside you call and say, "Hey, we need a third pair of eyes?"

Lennon Parham: Well, it all works all the time. [Laughter.] No, we're kidding. We're kidding. We're kidding.

Jessica St. Clair: I would say 99% of the time, we actually have the same opinion about comedy.

Lennon Parham: We have very different processes for how to get where we're going, but once we're there, we know we're there tastewise. We also have phenomenal support staff. Our writers' room we chocked full with a bunch of people from the same theater. Judah Miller, who was on AMERICAN DAD for many years, is our voice of reason.

Jessica St. Clair: Right. Our producer Scot Armstrong and Ravi Nandan. Scot wrote OLD SCHOOL and THE HANGOVER PART II, so he was really helpful in the male perspective, making sure that was legit. Most of the time, since we were best friends and also we studied at the same theater, we usually find the same thing funny.

Lennon Parham: Yeah. We also know if she's not in the room for some reason or vice versa, I'm going to be like, "She's not going to like that." We know each other pretty well.

Jessica St. Clair: Also, we're new moms. So we're so tired. We've only slept 30 minutes in the past six months, so we're just too tired to fight. It's just easier to make up.

Credit: Neil Jacobs/USA Network

Question: So did you explore this a little in BEST FRIENDS FOREVER? What makes PLAYING HOUSE a better fit for you guys?

Lennon Parham: You know, with BEST FRIENDS FOREVER, that was perfect for the time in our lives that we were in -- Brooklyn and...

Jessica St. Clair: Early married.

Lennon Parham: With this show [PLAYING HOUSE] we're really tapping into where we are right now and the stories that we want to tell. I think comedy really comes best out of a place of truth. Both of us were just pregnant for 10 months, you know what I mean. Both of us are new moms, and both of us are living this best friend, mid '30s story.

Jessica St. Clair: Yeah.

Lennon Parham: So that's where we're drawing all of the comedies from.

Jessica St. Clair: Right. We're not raising a baby together, but we sort of are because the show is just as needy as a baby.

Lennon Parham: Yeah, the show is our baby.

Jessica St. Clair: 24-hour attention.

Question: They didn't give you a lot of episodes last time. [NBC aired six episodes of BEST FRIENDS FOREVER in April and June 2012.] What is the episode commitment for PLAYING HOUSE?

Credit: Neil Jacobs/USA Network

Question: Jessica, there's a recurring gag in the pilot that people keep mistaking your character for a man. Where is that coming from?

Jessica St. Clair: I appreciate that. I appreciate that.

Lennon Parham: Her broad shoulders. It's her broad shoulders.

Jessica St. Clair: You know what it was? In college...

Lennon Parham: "Go get 'em" attitude.

Jessica St. Clair: ...I got a short haircut. You know the short haircut you get in college where you're like, "This is going to be a wash-and-go situation. It's going to be great"? I had seven or eight people tell me I looked just like Hugh Grant from FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL. I was like, "That's a man." They were like, "No, you guys are the spitting image." I'm like, "Okay."

Lennon Parham: Well, do your eye thing.

Jessica St. Clair: [Covering the lower half of her face] Right? This is kind of NOTTING HILL, right? [Laughter]

Lennon Parham: 100% Hugh Grant right there.

Jessica St. Clair: Do you see it? Right? But anyway, so I don't know why. We always just make that joke throughout.

Lennon Parham: Yeah, we do. It kind of runs throughout the season.

Jessica St. Clair: And Mrs. Johannsen is very old, and the actress who plays her, she's like in her 90s.

Lennon Parham: Oh, my God. Norma [Michaels]? Out of control.

Jessica St. Clair: She's amazing.

Lennon Parham: Which, you know, we have this amazing cast that I think you're going to recognize a lot of people from the comedy world, the alternative comedy world. We have some huge comedy stars like Jane Kaczmarek, Keegan Michael Key. Zach Woods. So the level of comedy they're bringing to the table is out of control.

Jessica St. Clair: Yeah. Something we did differently for this show than in BEST FRIENDS FOREVER is, in the writers' room, we were very conscious of writing our guest-star parts with our friends in mind.

Lennon Parham: Yeah.

Jessica St. Clair: So Upright Citizens Brigade is sort of like a grad school for comedians.

Lennon Parham: Yeah.

Jessica St. Clair: So all of these guys, we were 22 years old with.

Lennon Parham: Like on a tour bus in Iowa doing terrible sketches together. So the same chemistry that Jess and I have, you're going to see with our guest stars because we've just known them forever. So Bobby Moynihan, Zach and I were on an improv team together when he was 17 years old. Do you know what I mean?

Jessica St. Clair: Right. Jason Mantzoukas from THE LEAGUE. I don't know if you guys know Rafi from THE LEAGUE. He's out of control.

Lennon Parham: Lindsay Sloane from HORRIBLE BOSSES and BRING IT ON.

Jessica St. Clair: Oh, and then Marissa Jaret Winokur, who you know...

Lennon Parham: Tony Award winner.

Jessica St. Clair: ...from "Hairspray." She's married to Judah Miller, so we got her to play Candy, the waitress. Like it just was really kind of a family atmosphere.

Lennon Parham: Yeah. And there's a really sweet, charming town vibe, where it's just peopled with a bunch of weirdoes that...

Jessica St. Clair: Yeah.

Lennon Parham: ...know your every move and vice versa. So for Jessica's story, her character Emma is returning to this town where she grew up in...

Jessica St. Clair: Right.

Lennon Parham: ...and she kind of couldn't get away fast enough.

Jessica St. Clair: I've been in Shanghai for the past 13 years.

Lennon Parham: Yeah.

Jessica St. Clair: I also speak Chinese in this pilot. And please, if anybody is Chinese here, I don't do a good job.

Lennon Parham: I thought it was phenomenal.

Jessica St. Clair: I don't know. I don't know.

Lennon Parham: It was very accurate.

Jessica St. Clair: I could use the Rosetta Stone.

Lennon Parham: The idea of kind of coming home, it's a very familiar tale. All of us have done that, right? We've gone back to our small town and felt a little out of place, and everybody is kind of.

Jessica St. Clair: Right. Mrs. Johannsen, actually, is based on this woman who my parents live nearby in a really small town in New Hampshire, and over the summers I would try to do terrible things, you know, in the back woods, as you do.

Lennon Parham: With a boy. With a boy.

Jessica St. Clair: And literally, within seconds, this woman would be peering over, and my mother would get a call. So we put her in the pilot.

Credit: Paul Drinkwater/NBC

Question: Are there people that you know that you'd like to model your careers after, like Louis C.K. or Tina Fey or Amy Poehler or anyone like that?

Lennon Parham: Well, yeah, any of those. That works. [Laughter.]

Jessica St. Clair: Yeah, that works. We'll take that. We'll take that. Amy Poehler actually founded the UCB, along with three other guys. And she was...

Lennon Parham: So we did always look up to her.

Jessica St. Clair: ...sort of our mentor in a way. She's fiercely, outrageously funny live on stage. So that's how we sort of learned that you don't sort of play comedy as a woman. You just are funny.

Lennon Parham: Yeah.

Jessica St. Clair: What's funny is funny. In that way this show, we feel like the tone is sort of like BRIDESMAIDS in the way that it's laugh-out-loud funny, but there's also heart to it and reality. That's something I think Amy does really well. She's super funny, but she's also extremely warm. We just look up to her and....

Lennon Parham: Yeah.

Jessica St. Clair: ...basically want to marry her and be raised by her.

Lennon Parham: All at the same time.

Credit: Evans Vestal Ward/USA Network

Question: Could you talk about balancing new motherhood with working on the show?

Jessica St. Clair: Sure. What if I was just asleep during that? I'm like, "What? Where am I?"

Lennon Parham: You know what? Because we are the executive producers, we were lucky enough to have our babies with us on the set during the writers' room. So Jess was pregnant during the writers' room, and I had a 4 month old. So during lunch breaks I would go down and get to see my baby and be with her, and then in the afternoon again. That's the same way when we were shooting. We would take breaks.

Jessica St. Clair: We also had read somewhere that EVERYBODY LOVES RAYMOND did their writers' room from 9 to 5, which is very rare. Usually you go from, like 10 to 3 in the morning. So we thought -- and their whole philosophy was -- that you need to be living your life in order to have something to write about. So we actually did that, and it worked.

Lennon Parham: Yeah.

Jessica St. Clair: With shooting, we had to be wrapped by 6:30pm so we could be home for bath time. So all these guys, the crew members were covered in tattoos. They'd be like, "It's bath time guys. We gotta hustle." [Laughter].

Lennon Parham: Yeah, we had such a phenomenal crew.

Jessica St. Clair: We got home for bath time every single night.

Lennon Parham: Yeah.

Jessica St. Clair: Just ask our babies. They can't speak yet, but they'll tell you.

Lennon Parham: They will remember this, our sacrifices, and pay us for them later, I'm sure.

Credit: Neil Jacobs/USA Network

Question: How much is the supporting cast going to factor in? I mean, timewise, how much is the two main characters, and how much is the town?

Jessica St. Clair: It's really an ensemble. I would say the most time is spent on Lennon and I (our characters), Zach (our brother), and Keegan Michael Key from KEY & PEELE, who plays my love interest. And there's a nice arc there, a "Will they or won't they?" kind of...

Lennon Parham: Yeah, he's married.

Jessica St. Clair: ...situation.

Lennon Parham: So that's complicating things.

Jessica St. Clair: Yeah. I mean, who cares?

Lennon Parham: But then also, Brad Morris, who plays my soon-to-be ex husband...

Jessica St. Clair: Ex Bruce.

Lennon Parham: ...will keep popping up with some comedic moments. And then we just, like, populate every episode with our favorite people.

Jessica St. Clair: Yeah. So we'll have episodes that are let's say the marching band comes back for a reunion.

Lennon Parham: Yeah.

Jessica St. Clair: You'll see the whole town sort of come out for that.

Lennon Parham:  Or we decide that we're going to have all the cops strip in a MAGIC MIKE style strip show that I'm 8-1/2 months pregnant in a FLASHDANCE ensemble working them out. You know what I mean?

Jessica St. Clair: She does the speech from FAME.

Lennon Parham: Yeah.

Jessica St. Clair: "I want to see you sweat."

Lennon Parham: Yeah. "You're going to start paying in sweat," that kind of stuff.

Jessica St. Clair: So that's something to look forward to. We get Bobby Moynihan to strip down. It's pretty great.

Lennon Parham: Yeah.

Jessica St. Clair: So you're welcome, America.

Lennon Parham: You're welcome for those moves.