Tweeting is a great way to practice writing jokes, but there is so much more to comedy writing than just jokes. Jokes are a necessity, but you also have to learn how to write characters, to break a story, to keep coherence between episodes. I’ve learned more by being a TV writer than I ever could’ve on my own.
I did two episodes of ‘The Walking Dead,’ and it was enough to have time to get in there and really get the meat of it, but also then move on and take that experience and bring it into the next one. It was a great stepping stone.
I love Matt LeBlanc in ‘Episodes’ – he’s very good. And the ‘Modern Family’ cast just cracks me up.
When I was a kid, I’d wake up extraordinarily early every morning and turn on the television, scanning for episodes of ‘The Jetsons.’ For some reason, I loved the notion of a future where there would be flying cars, supercomputers, and most of all, robot maids to take care of the chores.
I told you, I have done a lot of projects and as often as I run into someone who recognizes me from something else, I run into someone who is like ‘You’re on Grey’s Anatomy’ and I have only been on for seven episodes. It’s kind of amazing.
Watching the dailies and then watching the… episodes, it really hits you: ‘Damn, I did that?’ I must have been crazy to get into those situations.
I acted in ‘Almost Famous.’ My album ‘Fingerprints’ won a Grammy Award in 2007. Even more prestigious, as far as my kids were concerned, I appeared in episodes of ‘The Simpsons’ and ‘Family Guy.’
We shoot double episodes in 15 days in Los Angeles.
I was on a sitcom called ‘Gary Unmarried’ for 37 episodes, and then I was in ‘Bad Teacher’ with Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake.
I remember watching episodes of ‘The Sopranos’ and being filled with dread knowing what was coming or anticipating what was coming. I don’t think that that’s always a bad thing. I think sometimes the audience needs a little catharsis held away from them.
They’ve got to deliver twenty-six episodes a season and they’re not going to beat their heads up against a wall if they feel something didn’t, like, pan out the way they had hoped.
I am not afraid if people think Matt LeBlanc in ‘Episodes’ is who I am – my friends and family know who I am.
I was a fan of ‘Six Feet Under’ and was very sad when it ended, so I was not ready to switch my allegiance to another show. So I was like, ‘I’m not watching this ‘True Blood.’ Then a friend got a bootleg copy of the first four episodes, and by the third one, I was irrevocably hooked.
With ‘Twilight,’ you have these massive tomes that you have to condense. With ‘Penoza,’ we had an eight episode Dutch series that, just for the pilot alone, I condensed three episodes. So, there’s a lot of filling in and a ton of invention that has to happen to fill out eight episodes.
‘Doctor Who’ is not as literary as ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and ‘The Hobbit’ is – books have come out, but they are from the television episodes. So there is that difference… it’s more scholastic.
By all standards, except for ‘Star Trek’ standards, 98 episodes of any television show is a wildly successful run.
Cable shows do 13 episodes. I get that. I can wrap my head around 13 episodes. You make them all, you post them all, and then you get to air them. The network cycle is way more intense. There’s more episodes.
David Boreanaz is actually a very good director and he directed one of our episodes. Excellent director, knew exactly what he wanted. We never had long days with David. He was great, he knew exactly what he wanted and he’s a fantastic director.
Certainly ‘Survivors,’ when we put that series out, the second series dipped below 5 million for one of the episodes – all of a sudden, there’s no recommission, and I think that’s dreadful.
By the time ‘Dumbo’s Circus’ wrapped production of its 120 episodes, I had an agent, and I had scored my first feature film gig.
‘All That’ was fire but I don’t really remember a lot of episodes.
I always love the holiday episodes, because you really get to see everybody at their best.
It’s really the rare creator who can tell you where he’s going to end the season of 22 episodes. That’s not bad. That’s part of the creative exploration.
Just because it reads well doesn’t mean it’s always going to look good on screen. Then, a network or studio has to pick up the show, and then they have to order more episodes, and then people have to watch it. It could be the greatest thing on television that nobody ever watches.
My first experience on public radio still ranks among the most embarrassing episodes of my relatively short life.
When I went back and watched a couple of the older ‘Doctor Who’ episodes, I could see why some people felt the show had been quite sexist.
I am a rapid-cycling manic-depressive, bi-polar one disorder, which means I can have thirty or forty episodes a year, and I used to have thirty to forty episodes a year.
‘Spooks’ was unique. It took up such a lot of your life – I think we did 10 episodes for the first few seasons. That’s six months of your life.
I really love the karate thing I did on CHIPs. I studied with a trainer because I knew we’d do episodes that had karate.
I’ve been on so many primetime shows that were cancelled – after one episode, after 10 episodes, after just one season. I got used to that. But I found myself choking up a bit at ‘OLTL.’ It was really hard to say goodbye to those people. It was not the way we wanted to go out.
The first season of ‘Community’ stumbled a bit because the plotlines too often veered into realism, but that is not a problem anymore. Not when prize episodes concern a campuswide blanket fort, or a secret garden with a magic trampoline.
I think sometimes when you have 24 episodes, you almost have to stretch things out too much.
The tendency of our time is wholly oriented toward the secular. The efforts of the mystics will remain episodes. Despite a deepening of our conceptions of life, we will build no cathedrals.
Children don’t mind when something was made – they don’t discriminate in that way. I tape very early episodes of ‘Rainbow’ and ‘Trumpton’ for my son and watch them with him. He loves them. ‘Trumpton’ was made in 1967, but he still watches it like it’s brand new.
To be able to say that there are 200 episodes of ‘Murdoch Mysteries’ is groundbreaking, and it really has snuck up on all of us. When we reached 100 episodes, we had a huge celebration, and the crowds, our fans, really turned out to celebrate the show with us.
I worked with Roger Moore on three episodes of ‘The Saint.’ He is a lovely man, a good director, and was my favourite actor to work with.
But did I think it would last more than 13 episodes at the time? No, I didn’t think that. I never know.
When the show started out, it was like all of a sudden we had to do 35 episodes and we had just a month and a half to write them, and it took me a while to realize that I was in charge.
You know, it takes a while to get used to – it’s a whole group of people with all these ideas and after you sort of navigate your way through the first few episodes it becomes collaborative and creative.
If it is a fantasy fiction, and you want to portray a story of a vampire, you have to keep the essence of the story same. But if you have to have five episodes a week, where do we get so much content from?
I was fortunate to work on a few episodes of ‘Barry’ right before we shot ‘Atlanta.’ That was where I got my training wheels for action coverage.
‘Star Trek’ episodes always insisted that humanity is on its bumpy way to what will be a glorious future in the 23rd century, in which we will have left most of our old selfishness – and old hatreds and prejudices – far behind us.
The way the British ‘Office’ got away with being so dark was that it only had 13 episodes. There are realistic elements that people obviously enjoy, but they don’t necessarily want to relive the trials and tribulations of their average work day.
If you watched ‘Lost,’ sometimes the episodes were crazy good, and sometimes you’re like, ‘That one was just sorta there.’
Summer is a great opportunity for all of cable. People love to find original episodes.
I have done a lot of short dramas that are three, four or five episodes and so that makes the filming process similar to the independent film process; it is very intimate, and it is a small cast and a small crew and everyone is there with a common goal and want the best for that project.
I don’t watch a lot of comedy. For relaxation and escape, I watch shows about how people survive bear attacks. Or old episodes of ‘Law and Order,’ the Benjamin Bratt/Jerry Orbach era.
I flew back and forth and did episodes of Roseanne while I was at Yale.
The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes.
Doesn’t anybody ever want to talk about anything else besides ‘Star Trek?’ There were 79 episodes of the series; there were 55 different writers. I was only one of them.
I think one of the coolest things about the job is the level of trust we have for each other. The actors fully trust that the writers will write amazing episodes, and the writers trust that the actors will follow their instincts with the characters.
