'Cougar Town' Executive Producer Has the Lowdown on Tonight's Hawaiian Finale

"The cougars are going to Hawaii!" might be an inaccurate way to promote tonight's season finale of the hit show, but I'm running with it nevertheless. At any rate, Executive Producer Bill Lawrence talked with Entertainment Weekly in a piece posted today, and he opened up about the inspiration for the hour-long episode, concocting new alcoholic beverages, and believe it or not, an appearance by a cast member of a previous Bill Lawrence joint.

The narrative impetus of the episode is that Jules (Courteney Cox) is chasing after her son, Travis (Dan Byrd), who is determined to become a beach bum. "In a misguided effort to get Travis to go back to school, Laure (Busy Phillips) talks to him  about how she was looking at these cheap plane tickets to Hawaii and how she had never gone to college and never gone on adventures like that, and she accidentally convinces him to take off [for Hawaii]."

This comes on the heels of the group of women deciding to take a trip together for Napa Valley, but they figure "What the hell! We might as well just to [to Hawaii] now and make it our trip." While Jules is chasing after Travis, the rest are there purely for the resort.

While that provided a good narrative bedrock, Lawrence was fueled by a different impulse: "['Family Ties' creator] Gary Goldberg, who is my mentor, challenged me years ago. He said that no one else could do a good location episode of a TV show. I thought we did really well when we went to the Bahamas with 'Scrubs' [Lawrence's previous sitcom]. And then we decided to try it in Hawaii with this gang..."

"But mostly it was an excuse to get the taboid people out taking pictures of Courteney in a bikini." Quite so, good sir.

Speaking of "Scrubs," who should the gang find in Hawaii but none other than the hospital's sad-sack lawyer Ted Buckland (Sam Lloyd). "Lloyd is playing the same character," Lawrence admitted, "I just thought it'd be fun to see him roaming around. We also needed Travis to have somebody there whose life had also fallen apart that he could be connected to. Ted is kind of a beach troubadour."

To read more about the finale, including Ted's surprising gift with pop music, head over to Entertainment Weekly.