You can very often start a new season with a lot more viewers than you had, leaving off the season before. It's a chance to pull the show into a train station, stop the train, and let all these new viewers on, so you can tell a new story. In some ways, a second season is a chance to tell a brand new story that you can wrap up, at the end of it.
The ability to be writing towards something that was actually going to be a whole series was a really big lure.
I really enjoy the pastiche storytelling of watching separate stories slowly collide with one another. The audience gets to participate in trying to guess and decipher how one story will connect with another.
That's the fun thing of casting a show. I'm a pretty strong believer that TV makes stars, not the other way around. I love the idea of having a cast where people don't associate them with too much baggage, so there's a certain amount of transparency between the character they're playing and the audience.
The most exciting part of the casting process was casting out of Israel, which was a really unique process, mainly done remotely from California, looking at casting tapes.
The depth of talent in Israel is just spectacular. I was very excited by it because when you cast in LA, you tend to see a lot of the same faces on lists for various parts.
I'm interested in how small the world really is, and this notion that what happens in one place affects someone else.
All you have to do is do a little bit of research and a floodgate of material comes your way.
With the casting in Israel, sometimes there were four or five people, that you could just flip a coin and choose from, that would have been all terrific. And seeing all of these fabulous faces that the American audiences are just not used to seeing is really exciting.
Now, the relationship the storyteller has with the audience is a much higher quality relationship. You treat them with a lot more intelligence because the truth is that it's not my fault if you don't know what's going on. There are plenty of ways for you to find out. You can talk to all kinds of people, and you've got access to all this information. The onus is no longer on us, as a storyteller, to tell you. You can go out and find out yourself.
Tou don't have to spoon feed things to the audience. They have to work at things. Oftentimes, with binge-able stuff, second and third viewings are really important because you see, "Oh, that character I didn't like, that was supposed to be that way because, in Episode 9, he turned out to be a turncoat. Now, I'm going to go back and watch all those moments that I felt that way about him." That's what's fun about it.
In the shows I've done serialized storytelling with, there are big open questions, but you like every episode to be identifiable as what it is. It's also very important that each season is identifiable. There's usually some big thing that you're trying to wrap up. There are big bows that you're trying to tie, by the end of the season, that you would do anyway because it's just good storytelling to tie those things up.
Even the most loyal viewers of a show would only watch one out of three episodes. As someone who made television, I always found that hard to believe because you want to believe people who love your show are watching every episode, but statistically it was true that people who considered themselves the most loyal viewers were only watching one out of three.
