"For two seasons we wanted to do an episode where Jeff Winger pretended there was a class called ‘Nicolas Cage Appreciation,’ and then the Dean caught them and as punishment to them he was going to make that a real class and force them to watch all the Nicolas Cage movies in one night. The thing about Nicolas Cage movies is… unless you’re a total cynical dick, you have to embrace the fact that Nicolas Cage is a pretty good actor. He’s done a lot of weird, dumb movies, but that was supposed to be the point of the episode — that Nicolas Cage is a metaphor for God, or for society, or for the self, or something. It’s like — what is Nicolas Cage? What is he? Is he an idiot? Or a genius? Can you write him off, or is he inexplicably bound to your soul?"

"Season 3 is about the price that you pay when you figure out that you love a group of people. That’s it in a nutshell. It’s about the high cost of valuing people other than yourself, and that’s the path that Jeff has been on. The third chapter for him is going to be the toughest of all. When you love people, their pain is your pain. Nobody’s going to have to deal with more this year than Jeff Winger."