Hey, I'm Josh Barrow, your new host of Left, Right, and Center.

Every week join Rich Lowry, Bob Shear and Me for a contentious yet civilized debate of the week's big political stories, from ISIS to the U.S. economy, to this 47 candidate presidential election we're having.

You can find Left, Right, and Center on KCRW's iTunes page.

From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment.

I'm Elvis Mitchell, sitting across my bicostal gentleman, who may know from many of his novels.

One of my favorites was Wake Up, Sir, which brings to mind his new series on Stars.

His first show was on HBO, but to death his new show is Blunt Talk.

I'm coursing across from novelist.

An executive producer and creator, Jonathan, thanks much

for being here.

Thank you for having me.

Oh, my pleasure.

We did an event at the LA County Museum with a show and ran the first couple of episodes.

And one of the things I told you I liked about what you've been able to do in these two shows

is make both LA and New York seem like small towns, like these villages that your protagonists kind of have the run of. And I think that's a really kind of interesting quaint feel for the shows.

Yeah, well, this friend of mine, this director said, he directed some episodes of Bored to Death. And he said, you kind of made

everyone feel like, not that it was hard to do, like, that New York was beautiful. Or, you know,

like that was like our, it was like our town, like out of Thornton Wilder or something like that.

And I wasn't aware that I did that, but I think it, there is some impulse, especially with

making comedies, to like, kind of want to make the cities sort of feel sort of magical and maybe

more benign than they actually are. It's a little bit of a fantasy.

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