Showrunners discuss strike, pie and Dr. Horrible at Comic-Con

What do television's hottest showrunners discuss when trapped in a room with fans during Comic-Con? The merits of pie vs. cake and a little thing called Dr. Horrible to start.

Lost's Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, Pushing Daisies' Bryan Fuller, Josh Friedman of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Josh Schwartz, creator of timeslot rivals Chuck and Gossip Girl do address some question about their shows during panel, but nothing other than their real fanboy leanings are revealed.

Probably the most intriguing thing that catches my imagination is when moderator Jeff Jensen tries to differentiate between the two Joshes by calling one Terminator Josh. In a comment that reflects the thoughts of everyone in the room, Cuse later asks, "Can you refer to us as Terminator Carlton and Terminator Damon?"

Highlights:

The Merits of Pie and Mythologies
- "Cake is dry. It's a big gamble. Sometimes it's moist, sometimes it's dry. Pie is always moist." -- Bryan Fuller on why pie is featured on his show.
- "The metaphor for us is sort of like the cake is the character show and the frosting is the mythology. The frosting tastes the best, but you wouldn't want to just eat the frosting. But I wouldn't want to eat cake at all at this point now. Maybe it's the crust. The mythology is the crust and the character show is the pie filling. Thank you, Bryan." -- Carlton Cuse on balancing story and the genre fun of mythology in Lost.
- Fuller's delicious take on mythology: "I love mythologies. I am sort of dyed in the wool Star Trek fan ... That's the sauce for the goose for me, and since we have this procedural element to the show, that's sort of our backbone. The more mythology we can do on the show, the more fun it is for me as a storyteller. I live for that s**t.
- "Serena is now a cyborg." -- Schwartz, getting in on the action with Gossip Girl.

Post-strike returns
- Both Pushing Daisies and Chuck have to reacquaint viewers on their mythologies when they return, sort of mini-pilots
- Terminator, however, will start about two seconds after the end of last season, so mid-explosion.

Weigh-in on Webisodes, Dr. Horrible
- "Mobisodes, webisodes ...We're doing it primarily for the diehard fans," -- Lindelof
- Fuller - "We looked into doing webisodes on Daisies. We have a pig character that's joining our cast, and we were going to do a series of animated shorts describing how Pigby came. And what we found was that because of the strike and all of the parameters about web content and who's paying for it ... we got a lot of resistance, so we weren't able to do what we wanted to do because everybody was afraid of writers' contracts and actors' contracts and how do you navigate that post-strike."
- Schwartz on Dr. Horrible, "Neil Patrick Harris is a very talented guy."
- Lindelof on Dr. Horrible, "Joss has been a guy who from the word 'go' really courted the fans through the Internet. He invented the Whedon-verse, and we all sort of followed in his footsteps ... Considering the jobs that we do that takes 300 people to make an episode of Lost, I'm just in awe of the accomplishment of Dr. Horrible."

Miscellaneous
- Cuse would most like to see Mr. Eko return. "We shoot our show almost entirely in Hawaii, which does not seem like much of a hardship. Most actors go down there and fall in love with it ... Adiwale was from London; Hawaii was just not his bag. He did not want to be there. He caught island fever, so he did not want to stay on the island. So, real life intervened."
- "The guy walked in, and I was like, 'When did you get so hot?'" Friedman on casting Brian Austin Green.
- While most of the showrunners list their colleagues shows as their favorites, Fuller adds,  "I really like Project Runway."

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