I'm perfectly happy to color within the network lines when I have to.
Series finales have that responsibility to leave you feeling good about entire series. You want to feel like the viewer closes the book satisfied. And if you strike out on the finale it skews how you feel about the entire series.
Nothing makes me happier than to have a smart person tell me why the show is smart, especially if I didn't intend that. I tend to be a very instinctual writer, and I don't plot shows out like, "This is my thesis and this is how I'm going to subtly sneak my thesis into this episode." I just approach it from, "We know these characters well, here are the situations that they're in, now how would they behave? What would the consequences be?" And it's always fun to see how people interpret that and dissect it afterward, and make me and the other writers seem probably smarter than we really are.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about what the audience would want. That's my job, is to anticipate ahead of the audience.
I still feel driven to try to make great shows and to make each episode great.
When you start a TV show, you're not necessarily thinking, "Are we setting up what we need for season seven?" You're just trying to stay on the air, and you try to learn your job as you go, and do what you can.
There are story-room sessions where you think about the big picture, like a novel, but once you have certain things in place, you have to treat each episode like an hour of TV, and think that maybe this will be the only episode that anyone will ever watch. You want to have some sort of beginning, middle, and end to the episode, even if you have storylines that are carrying over. You still want it to feel like a cohesive hour of entertainment. And you can't think about both at the same time.
I always think it's better to take your time and go through a lot of ideas - and dismiss a lot of ideas - before figuring out where to land. It's a good way to care for your audience, too. If you spend hours and hours and days and weeks coming up with the ending, then there's a chance the fans won't figure it out on their own.
Cheers was one of the first shows where I paid attention to the writers because their [work] was better than everything else I was watching. The writers weren't afraid to let a joke fall slightly flat if it advanced the characters.
Obviously there are different standards and practices that are allowed on cable versus network. You just have to embrace what your network is going to allow.
The worst thing you can do is end up with a network show on cable or end up with a cable show on network.
I've always read a lot of historical books and I'm a big fan of documentaries, and I've always thought of ways to do it.
There will always be economic pressure to make hits, identify hits, and then exploit hits. And you're going to exploit them with as many episodes as you probably can.
There are certain economics involved in making a network TV show that you want to amortize the costs of that, so the more episodes you make, the cheaper they all are individually.
One of the tricky things about running a TV show is that you just never know how good the guest stars you cast on a weekly basis, how good they're going to be in the episode. Sometimes they surprise you in good ways and sometimes they surprise you in disappointing ways.
In order to appeal to a wider audience on network in order to survive, generally your characters need to be, at a base level, a little bit more likable.
I've worked in network and cable on and off for a number of years, and you just understand what your parameters are. A lot of times, I think the best work that my team has come up with comes from having to deal with certain boundaries.
I was never that kid who grew up in New York and was always at the arthouse watching important films. I was the kid who grew up in the Midwest where there weren't any art films, and I watched TV. And that was really the medium that affected me and that I fell in love with.
I have no problem at all going back and forth between cable and network.
The payment for sins can be delayed. But they cant be avoided.
Everyone in Hollywood who is successful becomes less successful at some point. I'm just trying to delay that fall for as long as I can.
I don't ever want to have a weak episode of television with my name on it.
I don't want my writing to be recognized.
I don't want my writing to be so unique that when you apply it to different genres, it seems like the previous show that people know you from.
I would say on a creative level I put a lot of pressure on myself.
