You can't achieve anything entirely by yourself. There's a support system that is a basic requirement of human existence. To be happy and successful on earth, you just have to have people that you rely on.
The best shows are always the ones that are very, very low-concept and just about great characters.
If the doors aren't open, just kick them in and keep walking.
Sometimes you've got to just commit to the idea and press forward and trust that you made the right decision.
For storytelling purposes, there has to be conflict, but that doesn't mean the people have to be mean. I've never liked mean-spirited comedy.
What's important on a comedy show, or any show, is that some stories have to go somewhere. There have to be ends to the beginnings and middles you create. But sometimes it's like a way station on the highway, then the actual thing doesn't have to be this giant, climactic, life-changing, game-changing thing.
I think if you're too concerned with being cool or hip or liked, you can't really make good TV because sincerity and coolness are opposites.
I would far rather add a character who generates strong feelings than someone who just kind of floats along, generating medium-warmth smiles of gentle affirmation.
You really don't settle on an idea until you're really sure it's the best idea. Then once you settle on it you commit to it entirely. That was always the plan.
You can't just sit around in leopard-print slippers and drink champagne all day and think everything's gonna work out somehow.
You should be nice to people because it's better to be nice to people than mean to people, not because you think there's something in it for you.
In a weird way, it's not different from any other kind of joke-telling. You make those calculations about jokes about celebrities: is this a fair hit or not? The stakes were higher because the whole world was crumbling around us, but in terms of joke-telling, it's all about feel.
Despite the insanity of using whether you would want to have a beer with someone as a legitimate reason for voting for or against them, I always felt that is indicative of a massive problem in politics: It matters as much what your personality is as how smart you are or how good you are at your job. That is a huge, huge problem. A lot of people who are very smart or very good at their jobs are not people I would want to ever have a beer with - but I would want them making massive policy decisions with huge implications for the future of the planet.
It's all about media culture and people on television, and that feeling comfortable, friendly, or warm toward a candidate [in the elections] is a reason people would emotionally attach themselves to that candidate. I get the mechanics of it, I just hate that it's true.
I stopped using Twitter for a while just because I got sick of it and I started using it again, but I don't check the "mentions."
Amy Poehler did a really cute thing, [] [her son] said his prayers before he went to sleep that she was going to win [a Golden Globe] and when she got home she put [the trophy] in his bedroom. So when he woke up, he was like “Yes I did it, I did it”. He was so excited, he felt like he had somehow engendered the trophy into existence, which is so cute.
People don't seem to make the connection between their tax money and the benefits that they get from their tax money, like free education, and the fire department, and police protection, and everything else. It drives me bonkers, because it's pretty straightforward to me.
My favorite TV show of all time is 'The Wire,' which has the feeling of a project-based show. You draw in people from disparate parts of the world, and they have to work together to achieve a goal.
One of the worst things you could do in that world is curse at someone.
I got a lot of texts from friends and emails from friends and most of them were just pure jealousy.
In a world where your interactions with humans are solely about rating one to five, two things happen: One is all humanity is lost in the name of fake pleasantries and also there's no nuance to that system. There's no room for complex interactions that are rich and meaningful.
Society is completely unreasonable. People want everything and want to pay for nothing. They panic if they think about their taxes being raised, but if their garbage collection is a day late they scream and yell.
I am of the opinion that there is more high-quality television being produced than at any time in the history of television.
I don't know why anybody does anything in the world of television.
A million years ago, when doing research about the world of municipal government, one thing that struck me is how often people's job titles changed - from one department to another, from the public to the private sector and back again. People move around a lot, everyone has her eye on some other, slightly better situation in some other corner of city hall. Plus governments are constantly shuffling and reorganizing and shuttering or condensing departments - they are often byzantine hodge-podges of fractured org charts lying atop a bed of shifting sand.
