TVGuide.com: Hi, Rina, thanks for your time today.Rina Mimoun: Thanks so much for still saying Everwood is on the air. [Laughs] Our final prayers are with you!
TVGuide.com: As the season winds down, the Everwood faithful have been showering CW boss Dawn Ostroff with gifts in an effort to keep the show alive. For those who have yet to contribute, is Dawn more of a rose or a tulip kind of gal?Mimoun: I always say, "Send a lady roses." That's what I like to get. That way, for a brief moment, you can be really excited and think that it's being sent from, like, Taye Diggs or something.
TVGuide.com: With the roses, fans should include pages and pages of testimony about how fantastic the show is, right?Mimoun: Exactly. God bless you! I swear to god, I've turned into this crazy prayer person since all of this has happened. It's really not my scene, and now I understand why everyone thinks I'm the voice of Hannah. I'm telling you, I've been Amy since Season 1, and suddenly the fans have turned against me. They can't understand it!
TVGuide.com: From where you sit, have fans been satisfied with this season's stories?Mimoun: I think so. I sneak around on fan sites every once in a while, which I know I'm not supposed to do. If I see people are really screaming about something — even if they're screaming, "I hate it, and here's why" — it's a good thing, because it means that people are talking and people are excited. The point of television, especially when you're writing character drama, is not to get everyone to agree with you. When we had Andy Brown throw Madison out of Everwood, you can imagine the hate that came. My grandmother called me, hating me! She was like, "I can't watch it anymore," and I said, "But you're riveted, and you will."
TVGuide.com: There are only a handful of episodes left this season. What can you tell us about how it will wrap up? Will Kelly Carlson [as Ada] continue to cause problems for fan-favorite couple Bright and Hannah? Mimoun: You will no longer see Kelly, but the predicament remains. Hannah meets somebody else that causes a bit of a stir. But there is hope remaining for Bright and Hannah. As Ephram and Amy exist in the ether, Bright and Hannah have become similar in that way.
TVGuide.com: Good, because I've cried too much already!Mimoun: Oh, yay! [Chuckles] It will get happy for them.
TVGuide.com: Who else are we going to see in terms of guests?Mimoun: You are still waiting to see Justin Kirk (Weeds) and Charles Durning, whom I adore! If there is a Season 5, you will definitely see more of him. There are people leaving Everwood — major people saying goodbye forever.
TVGuide.com: Do tell.Mimoun: There's a person dying who is leaving the earth forever, but there are some other people who are simply leaving Everwood forever. Probably getting other shows, quite frankly.
TVGuide.com: In terms of this season's big death, what are some of the more humorous guesses fans have offered?Mimoun: A lot of people have been wanting us to kill Jake. Jake is not dying! Scott Wolf is my favorite addition to the cast, over all four seasons. He's just friggin' awesome — an amazing human being, an amazing actor. He handles a show like this better than so many other people, because he can really master comedy and drama at the same time. A lot of people thought we were going to kill Jake in some major drug overdose.
TVGuide.com: At his new clinic, of course.Mimoun: Yes, someone's going to bomb the plastic-surgery clinic. [Laughs] Then Joan Rivers comes to town.... That would have been a good one! But Jake is ruled out. The way we structured the episode where the person dies, there are three possibilities, and we lead you down the road toward three different people. I feel like I'm ruining it....
TVGuide.com: Some have said the death is more sad than tragic.Mimoun: I think it's both. For the people who are affected by it, it's certainly tragic, and there's one person who's definitely affected more than others. I suppose I could tell you the three people who it looks like could die, and then people can take their guesses.
TVGuide.com: Sure — then you can go read the message boards!Mimoun: You've got Bright with a serious problem after a major drunken incident at a bar that causes him to go flying through a sheet of glass. You've got Rose, with the scare returning. And Andy's father coming back to town... it will always cause speculation when a very old man comes back to town to meet his grandchildren. There are always questions when you bring in a super-old guy. It always seems like a last hurrah.
TVGuide.com: That could be too obvious. Mimoun: You never know. But it's just like writers to say there's a big death coming and then kill off a guest star. [Laughs]
Coming soon, in Part 2 of Insider's exclusive Q&A: Rina Mimoun reflects on the season gone by, reveals her favorite character, and shares the scoop on Everwood's syndication deal.

"UPN bought it," Malcolm creator Linwood Boomer recalls, "and it was over there about four months, where it went through the standard development process, which Larry Gelbart has likened to being pecked to death by ducks.
"No one knows what's going to be good or not, but it certainly didn't fit UPN's target demographic, so rather than try to force the show into being something it's not, they let it go." In short measure, Fox snatched up the comedy. "It was exactly what Doug Herzog, the new guy running the network, was looking for."
Frankie Muniz was barely a teen when he first filled the title character's forever-caught-in-the-middle shoes. "The fact that I was going to do a pilot was the coolest thing in the world," the actor remembers. "When it got picked up, we did the first 12 or 13 episodes before the show even aired, and we had an amazing time. And it just got better and better. The fact that we did go for seven years was just insane. Every actor dreams of having that."
Why did America relate to Malcolm the way that it did? Six-time Emmy nominee Jane Kaczmarek, who plays mom to the brood, has her theory. Though the series was ostensibly set in the present, she says, "It harkened back to a different time that I think people found comforting, a time when there were rules and you had to be really clever and work hard to get away with anything. Children now, they get away with too much. Lois said 'no,' which I find sorely lacking in mothers today."
Malcolm also forewent the typically sitcomy, glossy look at family life that was so prevalent at its premiere time. "It was about people with five children, doing minimum-wage jobs with no health care, and no housekeeper, no baby-sitter," Kaczmarek notes. "Yet Lois loved her family with a fierce, huge love. I think that Jane Kaczmarek might be pretty darn close to Lois Nolastname if I were in those circumstances."
Though one might remember Malcolm as an edgy look at adolescent tomfoolery whose content must have at times rankled the network and/or standards and practices, that wasn't the case at all. "We were always able to do pretty much whatever we wanted," Boomer says. "Creatively, we were never interfered with; that was sort of established right away."
Besides, he notes with a chuckle, "The thing about working in comedy is that the arguments you have with the network are never over anything you're terribly proud of. Like, we got to say 'butt wad' instead of 'butt munch.' Nothing you really go home and brag to your kids about!"
Talking up the final episode, Kaczmarek gets choked up just thinking about the script's first read-through. "It was so emotional," she shares. "I think it was just the finality of knowing that this was the last script we'd be getting, and the last time we'd be doing a read-through. Every day of it was excruciating."
Luckily the cast found support in crew and production-office members who, Boomer (the episode's director) says, "started gravitating onto the soundstage. By the time we were shooting our last scene, we had about 150 people standing around watching. It was like having a studio audience for the first time."
In a memorable juxtaposition of moods, the circumstances of one of Malcolm's final scenes put the goo in the cast's goodbyes. "There was this explosion of garbage," says Kaczmarek. "I don't know how to describe it, but we were literally covered in brown gunk while saying all these very emotional things to each other. That made it even more absurd and even more dear and just pure Malcolm."
What's next for everyone? Muniz, as you may have read, is trading shrieking siblings for screeching tires, as a professional racer for Jensen Motor Sports. "I'm trying to focus on that a little bit," he says, "and see how it goes." (His TV mom, still in protective mode, must quip, "He's planning on dying in a fiery crash. He's making all of us insane.")
Kaczmarek herself has been embracing the peace and quiet at home — although things could get a bit heated Sunday night as both her and her husband's (The West Wing star Bradley Whitford) series air their final episodes. "We have one television in our house, so we have the dilemma of which do you watch, and which do you TiVo," she says. "We've been leaning towards, of course, watching Malcolm and TiVoing The West Wing" — although the actress says she is torn about not having both shows digitally archived for posterity and repeat viewings.
Advised that TiVo does make a unit that records two shows at once, she remarks, incredulously and intrigued, "You're kidding?! Maybe I can get one before the 14th!"

Judge likens his consistent character-driven comedic style to shows like The Bob Newhart Show, but other KOTH influences might come as a bit of surprise.
"I remember when Do the Right Thing came out," Judge recalls, invoking Spike Lee's inflammatory feature. "I don't know much about that world, but it was just kind of interesting to see this dialogue that seemed very real. So when I was first writing the pilot, I was really thinking about the neighborhood I lived in and what I did day to day."
While King of the Hill may be the Texas equivalent of Do the Right Thing in its ability to capture local flavor, its conflicts tend more toward the institutional than the societal, with patriarch Hank Hill most frequently the character at odds.
"It's usually putting Hank up against something really annoying and ridiculous in the modern world," Judge says of the formula employed to create an ideal episode.
It appeared as though Hank's ordeals might come to end a little over a year ago, when Fox decided to order only five more episodes before calling it quits. In fact, the final five were completed when the show's staff began looking for new jobs. Then, suddenly, Fox decided to renew KOTH for a full 22-episode run.
"It was a little bit of a scramble to get people back," says Judge. "We talked and we looked at what we had and said, 'OK, I think we can probably do another good season.' So we decided to do it."
Speaking of scrambling, Judge has recently had to split time been King of the Hill and production of his next feature film, Idiocracy. A sci-fi comedy about a soldier who wakes up in the future to find humans have devolved into morons, the movie stars Luke Wilson and Saturday Night Live's Maya Rudolph. The effects-heavy effort opens in September and is a change of pace from his animation roots, but live action is the direction Judge sees himself moving in.
"I'm kind of thinking about Christopher Guest's career," explains Judge. "How in the '90s he started making little movies that [had] an audience. I'd like to do something like that, kind of lower-budget comedies."
If he does, Judge won't have to worry about juggling directing duties with King of the Hill. When asked if he sees the show going to 300 episodes, he doesn't hesitate to answer.
"No, in a word," he says with a chuckle. "But we've got another 20, at least."