The Hollywood Reporter brought together showrunners Carter Bays (How I Met Your Mother), Bill Prady (The Big Bang Theory), Liz Meriwether (New Girl), Paul Lieberstein (The Office), Steve Levitan (Modern Family), and Emily Spivey (Up All Night) to have a roundtable discussion. (Though, the gang actually shared three roundtables. Also, for some reason they were arranged by who did or did not wear glasses.) They address all the many stresses of the job, like deciding on pen color:
Liz Meriwether: I was unprepared for the leadership; people are looking to you for everything, and you’re pretending to be an expert on, say, props. It’s been the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But I haven’t had a baby.Carter Bays: Having to have an opinion on everything is just staggeringly difficult. “Is it the red pen or the blue pen?â€Paul Lieberstein: Then you try to delegate and make someone else the pen approver.
They joke but I always appreciate that Marshall exclusively uses blue pens. He is such a blue pen.