Bankrate: Was the show itself your idea?

Andy Borowitz: Yeah. What happened was, NBC had been approached by Quincy Jones, and Quincy had discovered Will Smith. He knew him from the music world. Quincy brought Will in to see Brandon, and I think -- to show you how to track an idea from a network -- the thought was, what was the popular movie that had come out a few years earlier that they could rip off. They saw Will and thought, well, he's Eddie Murphy in "Beverly Hills Cop," so we'll put him in Beverly Hills, and he'll be this streetwise guy in Beverly Hills. But that sounded like it had been done before -- specifically, in "Beverly Hills Cop." What really made me think in a different direction was hearing Quincy Jones, who lived in Bel Air, tell stories about his children, who grew up affluent and privileged. I thought that putting Will in a family like that would be something we haven't seen before. That's the genesis of it.

Bankrate: Did you remain with the show throughout its tenure?

Andy Borowitz: No. I was there for the launch in the first season, and then I became a consultant on it.

Bankrate: Did that show go into syndication?

Andy Borowitz: Oh yeah. It's still in syndication.

Bankrate: Do you have a piece of it?

Andy Borowitz: Yeah.

Bankrate: Is it safe to say that show made you pretty wealthy?

Andy Borowitz: Yeah. It did very, very well.

Bankrate: So why didn't you stay in television?

Andy Borowitz: I felt like I had done it for a long time, 15 years, and I was also working on a movie -- I produced the movie "Pleasantville," so I felt like I had done the Hollywood thing fairly thoroughly and felt burned out. I didn't have a plan. I didn't say, well, now I want to write for The New Yorker or anything like that. Those things just kind of happened. But I also felt that in television, especially in the sitcom world, it's very difficult to have multiple hits. There's so much luck involved in making a show a hit, and a lot of times people don't know when to leave the table. They get lucky with a show and think, well, if I keep rolling the dice, it'll happen again. Therein lies the path to madness. So I felt, well, I've been very lucky and I had a good run, and why not just step away and see what else there is for me.

Bankrate: It seems like everyone in comedy now is rushing toward television, trying to come up with ideas for shows. You're going in the opposite direction.

Andy Borowitz: And I'm really glad it worked that way, because sometimes what happens is, people work in New York and build up years of credibility pursuing their craft in comedy, and then they go out to Hollywood and sell out and do a lot of crap and that's the end of that. I wanted to get the selling-out phase out of the way at the beginning of my career. I sold out immediately, and then spent the rest of my career trying to build some sort of credibility to repair the damage I did to my reputation. So I'm in the rehabilitation phase of my career right now.