JOE: How're you doing?

Ok ...It's a pleasure talking to you

JOE: Where are you?

I'm in New York. Happy New Year to you.

JOE: Happy New Year ... wish I was in New York.

Oh do you, it's cold here.

JOE: I'm in Vancouver, it's cold here …. I just miss it.

Do you? Well maybe spring time will offer you something. So how far along are you taping wise now?

JOE: We're into shooting 19 out of 22

Wow! Because I remember the last time that I talked to you I was talking about the Dr. Quinn movie with you, you were just about to go to Vancouver the next day.

JOE: Oh yeah? That was March, 21st or 22nd, somewhere around there.

And I said I'd talk to you when you have this new show. We've only seen 3 episodes so far, it just premiered on the 14th. I did notice on this past Friday's episode an ex wife. Is that the last we saw of her?

JOE: No, she reoccurs, about 6 times or so. What she does actually in a kind of round about way to get herself back in my life, ‘cos I'm kind of like the old Peter she knew and loved before I got all messed up, she helps me buy back the school through a group of our friends and in this last week's show there was a line about screwed up kids are a good investment or something like that, (laughs), I forget exactly what she said but she had a pretty great line about - you know, the profit potential being great ... but anyway, yeah, so, she gets involved with me and a group of my old friends who I really can't stand anymore ....

Hmmm, I saw that little party thing where you, well, didn't even want to be there.

JOE: Yeah, and it gets worse and they come and they start insulting the way I live now - without knowing it but they are still who they are and I'm not like that anymore, so ... anyway they buy the school but by episode 19 I have just recently found a way to take care of my financial situation so I'll be able to possibly buy the school back from my ex-wife and just have it be my own without a bank or anything else like that, so it should only cost about 3 million bucks!!!!

Because it's also interesting that we see besides the children being troubled, your character as well has a history too.

JOE: Yeah, that's the way I could make sure that my character would be someone who was believable, somebody who what he says, you know, would understand what's going on. The kids know and they trust they him and he's not just talking because he read the book. He knows from where he speaks, he's been there and I think that makes him far more interesting and the fact that he has to struggle against things too and we get into that further, where I do fall off the wagon ...

Oh, because I know this one just past, you walked into an AA meeting and admitted you were an alcoholic ... and it was like ... okay ...

JOE: Yeah, and that's something that I never wanted to have always be present from the kids. First of all in the show there was the stuff in the first or second act when I bring the one kid through the induction, he asks about how do you know those drugs would be in my shoe and he used to go into this whole big back story right there, the exposition of what brought me to where I am and it was like you know, I think I'm tipping the cards way too soon here. We've been at these schools and when doing the research, you never tell the kids any more than they need to know based upon your personal life and about your background because then you're giving them stuff that they don't really know and that they can use against you. And there's a psychological warfare that goes on in these schools too. I mean the kids that come in are not dumb. You know, they're streetwise and they know how to play people and there's probably an 80 to 90% chance that they've been to both psychiatrists, psychologists, family therapists, so they know the lingo, they can play head games back to and give any answers you want to hear, divert your attention and they're pretty good at it, so if to tell them or show them your past, or like I said tip your cards a little bit, then it gives away your super powers and so just let them know that you know and that ... need to know basis too ... so that's why we don't get all of Peter's background right off the bat but it comes out that he has a relationship with a woman who comes back into the show, she already has, named Sophie Becker, who knows all about his recovery, she was there, she was one of the people who helped pick him up and start him off on his life again.

She was one of those, actually the second show, week two ... as you're on show 19 you've probably forgotten you've done so many,

JOE: Yeah, but I kind of know, Babes in Arms is the one where she parachutes in which was the second show I think ...

Yeah, and you both shared the same - all 3 of you were in the same cabin, I thought you're being nice

JOE: That was a fun ... yeah, I'm being nice, what a big heart I have, (laughs)

Ex wife, new girlfriend ....

JOE: Yeah, we laughed a lot during that episode, but ... I'm sorry we got off track didn't we ..

You were mentioning Sophie.

JOE: Oh yeah, Sophie comes back and she know his past, she was there, and then she took off for her own reasons after they started a relationship and when she knew he was getting better she left to travel the world and I went to Horizon and we stayed in contact. And then she comes back, 3 years later and we start up our relationship again.

Isn't it important that viewers got to know a little bit about Peter's background before we started on with the kids so that we got an idea of what he's been through. Is there any one of those students that sort of makes Peter remind himself of what he was like when he was younger?

JOE: Yes, definitely the Scott character I think is the closest to what Peter was like when he was that age, kind of a golden boy, Peter was, maybe not as much as Scott but certainly in his family and just in life - I have an older brother on the show who comes to me at one point and basically says I was the one who stayed home and worked really hard, I did this, I did that, you kind of sat on your butt, got drunk, had all the women, everything kind of came to you, and Peter is one of those characters who always kind of had a light around him and things went right, not like me, but I've known other people in my life who were like that and then all of a sudden everything good just turns bad and that's how Peter was and he didn't really have to try super hard, it just came to him naturally, and you know, it was just too easy for him, so I think it's interesting that you get that and that people know it and we play it in and out of the stories as we go along.

I know this past week was Auggie's - will each of the kids get a show so that we know what their backgrounds are like? I'm reading the bios here and the little explanations but for someone who doesn't have this readily available to them ...

JOE: Yeah, each one of them will get a show. Auggie's dyslexia runs parallel to Peter and his problems and it's kind of like men at different stages of their life, different problems they would have, men getting along with men and the reasons why they sometimes don't; me trying to get along with my father and my past and then Auggie trying to deal with his problem and the fact that he, when some makes fun of him, he just lashes out and his problem never really being recognized until this particular episode, it's like his second month at the school and it's all starting to come together. He's very artistic, and he's smart but he doesn't do well with his grades, he just never fits in properly and he cheats a lot. These are just ways he's found to be a survivor with his problem, his dyslexia.

Dyslexia happens to a lot of kids too ...

JOE: Yeah, you can be a functional dyslexic like I am, but he's a much worse case. He's kind of modeled after one of the writer's children too who has a profoundly dyslexic child who happens to be a girl, but it serves our purposes to make it a young man, but all the other kids are based on real life kids, the A.J. character, the Juliette and Katherine, I can't remember which are real names and stage names because at work we do both , you know people are calling me Peter and I answer to that, so anyway, yes, so everybody has their turn in the barrel so to speak and sometimes there'll be two storylines going on at the same time that refer to each other's problems so you can explore it that way. There are so many interesting ways to go with this and we're just discovering them now, like hey, there's this way to tell a story and then there's this other way which we haven't thought of yet. If we can think of a way to show the kids' past, whether it be in a flashback, the obvious way is a flashback but what are 3 other ways we can tell the story .... and let the audience know about this child's past without necessarily doing a flashback, it's not the cheapest way to shoot it either. Sometimes a flashback is not necessary to get the point across. People remember things by smells, by sounds, touch and taste and things like that and that's an interesting way I think of going about it. We've done things where just the echo of somebody's voice reminded them of something and that sets off a whole bunch of revelations or emotions depending on what the situation is, and so it's dealing with the way people react to life and their feelings and we end up dealing with troubled kids. But you know we didn't make up these schools and we haven't made up these problems. This is real life and they exist all over the place. These kids are real kids. We were just at the Television Critics Association and we're all dressed up and looking nice, we're not dressed in Gortex or flannel and the girls all have make up on which they don't wear on the show except powder, and you know they're pretty and nice but it's like well, these kids pretty much represent all the kids that we looked at. We looked at hundreds of actors and they're just typical kids. If you go to a high school kids dress nicely, and they're into their hair, the way they look and so what we have is just a real slice of life here and we have kids from many different types of background who normally wouldn't be together in one clique but are forced to be together like this because what they have in common is that they all have problems. And so you know, my answer to the thing about these kids looking so good was that pretty people don't have real problems? This is Los Angeles!

Oh those critics ....

JOE: Well I think it made them think for a second though too, it was like yeah, I guess and at the end of the day we do have to sell soap too so you know, we want to be entertaining and we want to be thought provoking if we can at times and we want to be pleased that we're doing something positive, something that we genuinely believe in and I think that's how Higher Ground is.

Do you think that kids will get messages from this show? Somebody who's in that same position and that there will be answers that'll help them in some way. Something they can do to change their life?

JOE: Well I didn't look upon my character as trying to impress anything upon people when I did Dr. Quinn and played Sully for all those years. How many people can relate to a mountain man with long hair, who lived in the mountains, who has a history of ... well has lost a wife, he's compassionate for his friends who happen to be Native Americans, he's the underdog always, but I didn't think the character necessarily had something that ..... you could watch and romanticize about because he was kind of like a character from a romance novel, but he wasn't exactly like somebody you knew, but people related to him, in just little things, so that people will find stuff that you're not even aware of as the actor playing the part. It's like when a musician writes a song or a poet writes a poem and people interpret things the way they can because that's part of the art of it, you know you take it and you interpret where there's holes and where things haven't been said you fill it in. I think that that character had stuff which helped people without even thinking about it - definitely this character - definitely the kids on the show are going to help people without even trying hard. It's like the message is they're not alone, that's part of the deal we're trying to get across, so yeah, I think it will help a lot of kids and I think we'll be getting tons of letters from parents and teenagers who say I'm just like that or I didn't realize that was the problem or it just kind of opened my mind up and let me be more allowing of certain problems that people have I think.

Now in your travels, where you spoke with students and you spoke with the teachers, I have noticed that the kids on the show do a lot of physical work, I know there's a couple of episodes where the kids are running and they have to get to a certain place by a certain amount of time and they only have 15 minutes to eat lunch, and then there was something where they were climbing ropes a few weeks ago. Is that something that they do at these school?

JOE: Oh yeah, we didn't make any of this stuff up. That's been the easy part, we've gone to a few of these schools and some of them have a better set up because they can afford the $60,000 towers and stuff and then some other ones are just as simple, they've rigged up rope ladders and things in trees and it's all just a way of giving the kids confidence and being forced to work as teams because when climbing, it's not necessarily a solo sport - you can - but most of the time you do it with a buddy and you have to rely on the person on the ground whose taking up your slack and all that stuff so you don't fall to your death and behind that is a counselor watching that person so that everything is backed up - but places we went to up in Idaho there was one tower like I told you about which was great - it had all these different rope courses so you could climb 10 different ways in day and get about 60 to 70 feet so you got way the hell up there, so that the kids who are scared of heights deal with it. There's a rope tethered to them so they're not going anywhere but they're scared. I've been up on all these things and I don't necessarily have a fear of heights that much and once I'm on the set, and I have the clothes, the makeup, I feel like I can't get hurt anyway and the dangerous part of me is I go ok, it's not real so it's ok, I'm not really up that high and I go and I climb on, but I've seen the kids, just the ones we work with - not everybody can come and climb a ladder or a mountain, or get in a kayak - these are things we're doing and some of the kids aren't really that comfortable with it. I've seen them at the end of the day and they'd be like - yeah - that's cool, climbing the wall and having to repel down, and they get excited, they haven't done this before and this is a job, and they're getting paid and having fun, and working so at the end of the day they've accomplished something themselves, they've put in a very respectable day's work, they've done a good job as actors and at the same time they've climbed higher than they did in the past and they're not so scared anymore. What happens to them in real life happens to these students, the self esteem, the confidence, having to rely on somebody else and have somebody cover your back. It's very important to the kids and there's the quest that they take them out too where the longer you've been at the school, the more conditioned - because some of these kids come in - they're unhealthy, they haven't been eating right, they haven't been sleeping right, they've been troubled, they've been doing drugs, you can't take them and throw them into these drastic situations, they'd get sick, the kids would have meltdowns. You don't take them out in the woods and say ok 10 days you'll live on berries like you're Eull Gibbons - they have to be made healthy and once they're up to speed, then they're brought out on these quests and these quests last longer and you bring less when you go out there the more experienced you are. They can be out for 10 days as a group and one group has to take care of gathering wood and getting food and setting up the camp and still having class and maintaining a regular schedule like they would at the school - and making it from a to b and leads to the next point, another shipment of food or water will be brought in for them so they can sustain themselves for the next couple of the days. It's great when they come back because they talk about their experiences and they have group therapy out there - so all these things happen - they do all this stuff as part of the outward bound course. We are always trying to look for ways to bring the show outdoors and to have that action and adventure element while the kids are going through the healing process and sometimes just for fun, because these kids are just kids, sometimes it's just to look at the beauty out here and no one has thought about listening to their Marilyn Manson CD's back at the place, they've been preoccupied just looking around. One of the episodes that's going to be on this coming week - Hope Falls - there's this moment where Jim Byrnes takes the Cliffhanger boys out - the core group of boys, the male leads on our show - although there's 150 students, we concentrate on Cliffhangers - there's the girl's dorm and the boy's dorm and we just take the boys, not the girls to prove a point and two of the boys kind of work out their problems with each other and he brings them to this place and they don't quite understand why they're going there, just ‘cos they're all pissed off that a kid killed himself in their dorm and he brings them to Hope Falls and he shows them the place where he buried his son 20 years before who had died of a drug overdose and one of the kids who is more experienced with drugs - he's like our resident pharmacist in the show - he goes maybe it was just an accident and makes some joke about it - but how often are drugs an accident? He was purposely taking them and he purposely took too many probably, but anyway, when this man visits his son, he then starts Horizon, founds Horizon so it doesn't happen again hopefully to another kid. And he buries him at the foot of this place called Hope Falls which is this great waterfall we have over here just down the road, and that's where he brings the kids to the base of the waterfall and he says how can anybody with this kind of thing in the world ever give up all hope. When things look that bad you just look at stuff like this and it just makes you feel a little bit better. You can't give up all hope in a world of such beauty. And so that's the kind of message we're trying to convey and that's one kid - here's that line - I think maybe it might have made a difference to me although I didn't contemplate suicide when I was a kid, I think it would have made me think yeah, even on those days which really suck - there are going to be the days that make up for it.

There was a scene which I believe was in The Pilot when you were doing your mountain climbing - there was a point where you got up on the peak and it was very high and I was going oh, you are a brave one.

JOE: Oh that was great ...

Where was that?

JOE: That was - I went to work that morning to shoot in the studio, then jumped in the car and they raced me up to this little air field out of - there's a big ski resort about 90 miles from here, it's about half way up to Whistler, there's a little town called Squamish where there's a little air field and a lot of guys fly their own planes out to their private cabins and places way out in the woods - that's the only way to get there in a helicopter. We rented two helicopters and flew out to the mountain range which are about half an hour from where I am in Vancouver - by car it takes an hour or so then you have to fly in by helicopter and they just dropped me on top of this mountain with a mountaineer and a guide because it was a mountain where you can't without equipment get back down because it's glacier all around me, surrounding half of the mountain and then it's a technical climb to get back down from there, so anyway, in case the weather changed which is a very strong possibility up here, and they couldn't get the helicopters up in time to get us and we had to spend the night, the backpack that I have on my back is real. It's got extra clothes in it for me, it's got food in there, water that I brought and then he brought up stuff like a little dome tent and a sleeping bag and stuff for us in case we got stuck up there and had to spend the night until the helicopters could come back. In the back of my mind I thought that's kind of cool, I'm not going to die up here, it's going to be fine, it might get a little chilly but they know exactly where I am and it would just be a matter of when they can get back up there. Anyway, so he hid up there in the rocks and the helicopter just touched down on a little pad no bigger than your desk probably and right there we jumped out, lay down on the ground right by the base of the helicopter and he took off above us - because you don't want to get in the way of a helicopter, especially if its windy and so he had this real quick get in, get out as its dangerous to try to land on a mountain like that. He went off and shot a bunch of the other ariel stuff and I ran across the top of the mountain - it's like a 3,000 foot ledge and if you look closely, there's a little spot that we've already marked out where I could fall if I lose my balance, fall and lay flat on the ground right there but the next step is right over the edge, it's just a little spot where I have to walk through all the worse case scenarios with the guy. So we looked at it and said okay if I fall, I fall there and lay flat, spread eagled, don't move - there's one shot where the helicopter came in - we went up there twice that day because the first round of shots we weren't happy with and so we took a chance and went up a second time and the sky looked even prettier and we liked it better and we worked out a little plan of signals as the helicopters are so close and loud that you can't hear anything, you can't even hear the guy yelling to me so we just worked out hand signals and just basically we did a whole bunch of different things up there knowing we could use this stuff in other portions of different shows, shot, shot, shot. At one point they came in really close the wind was blowing me so hard I got a little scared and had to kneel down. I'm trying to be cool - if you see me kinda kneel down as if I'm about to pray, but I knew I couldn't stand up anymore because the wind was catching my backpack and I was like oh shit I gotta kneel down. That was a great day though it was warm up there, the sun was shining and there's a glacier right next to me.

Do you find places where you can escape, you know, just spend a couple of minutes or a couple of hours while you're not shooting.

We bought a house up here and it's pretty much my sanctuary. It's really calm and quiet and we live in this little town like a little fishing village and it's just very quaint and that's where I come home, that's my place. I'm going today actually, I have the day off and my in-laws in town and I have to take them back to the airport and on the way back I'll stop by the marina, I'm looking for a boat, probably an older little boat to restore because I like having little projects. We just remodeled this 1930's house out here and we kept it very true to its original style, the materials and things we used, and we made quite a cosy little home I think.

So you have adjusted?

JOE: Oh yeah! Didn't take much for me. My wife and I are pretty much living the kind of life we like. So the next thing will be a boat and that'll be my sanctuary because we love to go hiking and go for long drives and then great hikes into the mountains I thought wouldn't it be great if we had our own boat too and then we could take the boat to one of these islands and just anchor it and take a little dingy to shore and go hiking on the little islands where people aren't. You know, we could really get away from everything. Have picnics out of the boat and goof around and take the dogs - my dogs have been on many boats - I rent them all the time, in fact I rented one two days ago and had a glorious day out here - took the baby in the stroller, my in-laws, my wife and we went banging around Howe Sound in a little boat and it was just beautiful.

Have you taken your in-laws to the set?

JOE: Yeah, they haven't been to the studio itself, my wife hasn't yet been to the studio, we've just been too busy with the house and everything to come on by and we've been shooting outdoors more than normal - we've had some foul weather to shoot in. But I do it and everybody else I work with does it because they get paid. We dress right for shooting scenes and have to take off all our rain gear and stand there ... but to have my wife and baby out - would be a nightmare eh as they say up here.

The kids on the show - did they know you from Dr. Quinn?

JOE: Yeah, some of them , in fact Candace who plays Katherine on the show, she's like I used to watch you in South Africa with my grandmother we used to watch Dr. Quinn. It's really bad when you're working with all the kids who are extras on the show and a couple of the girls go I didn't know who you were but my mom is a really big fan of yours - like you're what, 16? You don't know who I am but your mom - get out of here! Your fired ! (Laughs).

I have noticed that when the show opens, it opens up with a quote. Is that something that you guys decided on?

JOE: Actually it was my idea and Michael Braverman sitting over having lunch one day in Los Angeles we were talking about The Pilot and things that make my character tick and he had a quote - um, there's been so many, Some of us are in the gutter .. Oscar Wilde and I said it would be great - I always thought Chrissy Hinds was the author of that - the best thing would be to not only give the quote but always have a quote at the beginning of every show, not just the Pilot and let us know who did it so that right there you're learning something right off that bat - oh that's interesting, John F. Kennedy said that or ...

And it's not as if it doesn't pertain to the subject of the show ....

JOE: No sometimes you have to go round about for a while to try to figure out how it pertains to the show ... we had an Albert Costello quote .. but again if you take two or three minutes to figure out how to work the quote into the show we got you! You're thinking something about the show, so that's good.

Are we going to see Peter's father anymore?

JOE: Yes, you'll see him several more times.

Did Peter's relationship - would you sort of qualify that with Frank that Frank is a replacement father?

JOE: Frank is the father that I never had a relationship with and I'm the son that he never had the chance to have a relationship with. In that, then you know, I see the Scott character being a younger version of me so there's like Scott, me, Frank - they're very similar men, similar backgrounds, the dynamics of the relationship with their fathers, with their sons, you know, that's what makes the 3 of us very similar to each other. Men at different stages of their lives. But almost the same kind of man.

Are you going to basically keep the same amount of kids, no additions or ....?

JOE: Well, our show's set up so that if you go longer, you know if we're lucky enough to have a second, third, fourth, fifth year or whatever the deal would be, the show has always been set up to rotate the kids out for it to be realistic and no there won't be 30 year old kids at the school. We hope that we are the springboard of the Leonardo DiCaprio, Neve Campbell, Liv Tyler, I hope that's what our show turns into, the place where people come in to and take of to bigger things but no they can't stay, like Katherine, she's the oldest, she's been there the longest, she's coming up to graduating - whether or not her character chooses to stay on and be a counselor or go to the local college in the area because sometimes it's really hard for the kids to leave these schools, they have to be programmed before they can go back into society, it's like we're not going to sit around and have groups any more, you can't talk to a stranger on the street just like you talk to us in group, this psycho babble stuff isn't normal in every day life and you have to make people realize this too, otherwise you have people going out there and opening themselves up to people who don't care and get themselves in trouble again, so anyway, her character, we haven't quite decided yet, we're working on that right now as to whether she stays or goes, whatever, we're not sure. The rest of the students will go through the natural process of learning and growing, graduating, moving on. That's what it's all about and some kids don't make it and some kids go on and have great lives and are always indebted to these schools and other kids go on and live their lives too, it's not perfect, it's not a perfect science what these people are practicing but they're trying our best and hopefully that's good.

When you talk to the kids at the schools, was there a certain length of time that they're there? And do they open up very easily? Do they know that because they have a certain amount of time to be there ....?

JOE: The counselors told us that it almost happens like clockwork, it's about 6 weeks of hard core kids, kids who seemed like they were going to talk would only talk to a certain extent. They really don't start opening up until about 6 weeks. They've been there long enough to learn a routine and starting to forget their old routine. They feel like they're something. Just think about going on vacation. For the first 3 days you can't relax and on the 5th day you start and on the 7th day you're back on the plane going home. These kids have already gone past that stage, they have a comfortable rhythm going and the people are starting to work on their personalities and telling more and more, but usually if you haven't gotten any place with these kids in six weeks, then they're really tough. One character, Shelby, on our show, she's one of the tough ones. She's been there several months and she still hasn't cracked. She does, as we go along. We had the second episode, Babes in Arms where we bought a Sarah McLaughlin song which our show doesn't usually have the money to do but Sarah McLaughlin saw it and gave us a kind of a discount on the price of her song and we were able to buy "In the Arms of an Angel" and Shelby's character crawls up into the arms of a carved bear that we have at the school just because she's wanting so much to be loved and held but she won't let anybody in on it.

Is that the episode where the little girl was lost?

JOE: Uh huh! Kind of like all lost little girls kind of thing. That's what she was supposed to be, and then Shelby's a lost girl because she had a terrible father and step father, she has a sexually abusive background, she's based on a real character, a girl whose biological father sexually abused her from 9 to 14 then her mother got divorced, got remarried and the step father picked up where the real father left off and at 15 she ran away from home, lived on the streets and then mother found her and brought her back and put her into one of these schools, and that's Shelby's background.

That's why she can relate to Scott because of that step mother there..

JOE: Yeah, they hate each other for the first few episodes and the relationships go towards the obvious first, the prom queen girl, the eating disorder girl goes for the football player and they try doing their perfect little step for a couples kind of thing but it doesn't work and we end up with much more interesting relationship going on with people who are attracted to people.

Speaking of relationships - will they be building on Peter's relationship with Sophie?

Yes. She's from the past, my past, one of the people who helped me, the other one was Frank who started the school, one of the people who basically saved my life. She was in the hospital at the time I had one of my overdoses (I had 3) on the second one she was there. Peter loves her, he always wanted to get a relationship going with her, a serious one, but was too messed up and now, seven years sober, I'm kind of getting my act together, trying really hard and doing good things and she isn't ready and she can't have kids which she hasn't told my character yet, so, that's what's keeping them apart and a very estranged relationship with her mother, doesn't get along with her, that's why she's kind of like an adrenalin monkey what Sophie's hooked on is adrenalin which is what makes Peter and her an exciting couple when they get together. They love to push it.

That must have been some discussion around the table to get everbody's history together for these characters.

JOE: Well, we were like a year in the making. We toiled over this thing for a long time, lots of sessions getting everybody together, but trips to Idaho and Southern California kind of brought it all together and made it so much simpler. Look at what that kid said over there, and what that person said over here . .. you know ... it's been just great.

Have you had feedback from the kids that you did speak with?

JOE: No, we have not. We haven't talked to them yet. They wouldn't be seeing it anyway at the school because they don't watch television there. They'd have to be back home, so, unless, they for some reason said okay, but they haven't told us they're doing that at the school. Like hey, remember those guys who were up here? This is the show that they did. It'd be fun because when I told them we were going to do a show they got very excited and said please don't make it cheesy, make it real and we promised to try and do our best, but no, it'd be interesting to see what they thought about it.

Are you satisfied with the progress so far?

JOE: Yes, it's a learning process for all of us trying to find the rhythm of the show, trying to find the visual look something that separates it from other things, from other shows on television, anything out there, so now I'm watching more tv, different shows, even ones that I don't like just to check them out. I don't like Ally McBeal, I love the Practice. Why don't I like ... it's coming from the same creator which is the things I like about this, but in keeping with the MTV style, music video style, our first director, that's his background, commercials and music video so we wanted to adopt a lot of the interesting camera movements and ways of shooting things and not necessarily the same form of editing that you see on every other kind of television show because one thing about being on Fox Family and being on a show which is coming from total obscurity is that we don't have to play by any certain rules. We're making the shit up and creating grammar and trying to do our best as we go along and we find a style and a rhythm. Some shows are better are better than others, some shows I'm completely happy with, some shows I could toy with for the rest of my life and never be completely happy with. This last show, Walking the Line about my character going back to New York and stuff, it never worked for me and I don't know why. We tried doing other things, is it the acting, is it the writing, is it the direction, is it just what the stories are about? I can't put my finger on it. Some people love that show, but no, there are some which are just really really good and we get better and better as we go along. One we worked the hardest on was the Pilot and still nobody was happy with the Pilot completely. Like, God, what we need is extra time, not time to shoot it but time to tell the story, most pilots have the luxury of being two hours long and a pilot is difficult, you have to introduce all the main characters, get the exposition out of the way, toil with the background, what's going on, all in 42 minutes, that's a lot to tell. So that was our big problem. Man, if only we'd had another 30 minutes to fill in these spots, but it's done, it's on the air, it's been reviewed and now we just move on. It gets better and better every time.

Have you ..(can't make out what's being said)..... for the kids on the cast?

JOE: Oh yeah, not that they weren't good when they came in, like I've seen one of the most experienced people there, actor wise, which is Jim Byrnes who has been around for a long time, and then there's me, I had to figure out Peter and get rid of the way Sully talked, I talked like this one guy for 6 years and I didn't speak like him normally, the accent, the lazy English thing I had to get rid of and go back to the East coast roots and think I schools and totally find the way he would handle stuff, mannerisms and things. The kids have grown, because they're becoming their characters, when we went to the casting sessions, there were little sparks we saw in each person and thought yeah, I think they'd be really good at this and some of these characters are a lot like their characters in certain ways. You bring some of yourself to a character when you're an actor and all these kids take what they're doing and their craft very seriously, much more so than I would I think at their age. I don't know, I wasn't that focused as a teenager. I was all over the place because I didn't know ... I knew I wanted to be an actor but I didn't know if I'd be able to realize that dream. I just didn't see any possible way of that happening so I was very confused with where I wanted to channel my energies, but ....... (can't make it out)

Will we be seeing Peter riding horses?

JOE: NO! NO! The only horses I'm riding is a 68 Triumph and an old Ford pickup truck.

And the fact that you're back in regular clothes.

JOE: Yeah, I'm in regular clothes, although I wear a suede timberline jacket once in a while just to kind of refer back to Dr. Quinn and did you see the lodge in the show? It looks hauntingly like the one on Dr. Quinn, a little inside joke for myself.

Well, it's your day off, I want you to enjoy the rest of your day. It's been a pleasure talking to you again.

JOE: Thank you very much. Hopefully I'll talk to you next season. Take care. Bye.