I’ve seen a bunch of the ‘Portlandia’ episodes, and they’re pretty hilarious.
Boy, you know, it’s amazing how your brain can turn into a sieve, and you can literally forget episodes that you have shot.
I did not have a very in-depth knowledge of ‘Star Trek’. I’d seen a couple of the vintage episodes. I knew just about as much as anyone on the street.
I watch episodes of ‘Rosanne’ now where I don’t even know what the ending’s going to be.
As a child, I was embarrassed by my dads effusive episodes, but I suppose I got used to living with someone who was intermittently sad.
What makes me happy is just curling up in with my mom in her bed and watching a marathon of ‘CSI’ and ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ episodes with pints of ice cream.
I’m a regular part of the TV audience world, and I know that I like shows that I would watch. And this is a series that I definitely would watch. And some episodes are better than others.
If somebody actually came to me and said, ‘O.K., this is it: write your last ‘South Park’ episodes,’ I’d be like, ‘No, no, no.’
It’s hard to tell what an entire series is going to be based on the first few episodes, or even on the first season. And it’s sad because you see great casts and good ideas that don’t get that opportunity to grow and show what it could turn into.
It takes awhile for writers to get to know actors rhythms, not just as actors, but what they bring to the characters. I think it takes a few episodes for the writing room to catch up to the actors and vice versa.
I’ve had it. I did 4,700 episodes. Isn’t that enough?
If we lived in a time where people couldn’t watch ‘Lost’ on Hulu or record it on their DVR, we wouldn’t necessarily have succeeded. We need people to be able to catch up. Now you choose when you watch TV. We wouldn’t have survived in the old days because people would have missed episodes.
We did 356 ‘Dallas’ episodes between 1978 and 1991. The most memorable moment for me happened in 1980 when I got shot at the end of the third series. The rest is a blur.
Yeah, I’d done a bunch of pilots. Some that had gone for a while. One that went for 13 episodes. But I had never been on a show that had lasted more than that.
I’m always watching old episodes of ‘The Golden Girls’ or ‘The Simpsons.’
We record when I have a hole in the schedule. Sometimes night, sometimes afternoon, sometimes morning – we fit it in when we can. I prep for episodes all the time.
But my main thing that I would love to see as a fan of ‘Glee,’ like I said, is to really get into the character and who they are and what they do outside of school. I think that that’s interesting. And then of course the themed stuff and the album episodes are all really cool too.
I think a challenge with every sitcom is, how do you maintain things that people are attached to without becoming so reiterative that it just feels like you’re sort of watching a reenactment of previous episodes?
The English are very indulgent to episodes of alcoholic insanity.
As a teenager, I struggled a lot, had several major depressive episodes, and ended up dropping out of high school and getting a GED.
I’ve seen episodes of ‘Friends’ which are as funny as any sitcom I’ve ever seen.
I think that’s the great thing about all ‘Black Mirror’ episodes – it really leaves you with this feeling of not knowing how to feel.
I love playing the stuff with McGee at home with Delilah. We’ve had episodes where it shows them at home arguing over making dinner and things like that. I love doing that stuff because it’s different than what the show normally does.
You have 22 episodes to start from zero to hero; you can really take a nice, big, long arc. In a film, it’s tough to do that – you only have 90 minutes.
I don’t have any favorite episodes from ‘Joanie Loves Chachi.’ I liked working with the people. But I didn’t even want to do it. I was talked into it.
I don’t watch ‘Glee,’ not that I have anything against it. Whenever I miss the first few episodes, I won’t watch the series.
I loved my time on ‘The Mindy Project’ so much. It was only supposed to be half a year. It was really only supposed to be one episode, and then it became three episodes, and then it became half a year, and then it became a year and a half, and then it became two years.
One of the things I’ve been most excited by is U.S. television drama. For my money, it’s some of the greatest narrative art of our time. Each series is like a 19th-century Russian novel: you need to do a lot of work in the first few episodes, just as you do in the first 50-60 pages of those books.
‘A Storm of Swords’ is a massive volume, and it seemed like it would be shortchanging it to try to cram it into ten episodes.
History, at its best, always tells us as much indirectly about ourselves as it does directly about our predecessors, and it is often most revealing when it deals with episodes and phenomena that we find repulsive.
I developed a theory that, in many ways, the early ‘Andy Griffith’ episodes especially were an awful lot like a Capra movie. They were a lot like ‘Mr. Deeds’ or a lot like ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ in tone and presentation.
I got the first thing I auditioned for – a guest role on two episodes on ‘All Saints,’ and I don’t think I had ever been that excited.
I love it and it is a blessing to be able to have seventy-five to eighty episodes to develop a character and find your voice. You have a similar through voice, and yet you are making different decisions, and so you act differently and you make different choices, as that is what your character would do.
I have a type of bipolar that swings up and down all day long. There are significant mood swings within a day, within a week, within a month. I go through at least four major episodes a year. That’s really the definition of bipolar rapid cycle. But I have ultra-rapid, so I have tiny little episodes all day long.
My favorite day at ’30 Rock’ is Thursday when the show airs. At lunch, we screen the episodes. For everyone to watch together, to see the stuff we all worked on, to hear the crew laugh – it’s great fun.
I was doing ‘Homeland’ and read the first two episodes, and all I wanted was episode three to know what would happen next.
All the weird inconveniences of adult life that you thought they made up to lend excitement and color to episodes of ‘Sex and the City’ are, in fact, real.
As soon as I knew we were going to be doing tribute episodes, and as soon as I knew the landscape of ‘Psych’ allowed us to do homages, the show creator and I both had respective dreams. His was a musical episode, and mine was a ‘Twin Peaks’ episode.
Last summer a second unit production crew went to France and shot scenes for several of this season’s episodes. They shot costumed actors in and around real castles and landmarks, we couldn’t possibly have duplicated here in Hollywood.
Why should I ever get fed up talking about my father? He was a brilliant, colorful man who left us with thousands of memories. Most people remember his films, but I’ve got anecdotes and advice and episodes of real life tucked away inside my head.
In ten episodes, we were able to do our writers’ room first. We did that all summer and wrote for 15 weeks and got everything in really good shape.
I didn’t record any additional dialogue for this CD, they are excerpts pulled from existing episodes.
I do 280 episodes of TV a year, write 15 recipes for the magazine, and publish an annual book. With all of that, we try to get one weekend a month with Isaboo at our home in the Adirondacks to relax and recharge.
The first episodes I actually read for ‘Downton,’ Sybil was really intimidated and hadn’t come into her own. So it’s only in Series Two that she’s become so headstrong. In general, I find it exciting to play strong, female roles because they’re shocking.
I really loved the ‘Sopranos’ but didn’t have HBO. So someone would send me tapes of the show with three or four episodes. I would watch one episode and go: ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to watch one more.’ I’d watch the whole tape and champ at the bit for the next one.
‘Battlestar’ was 22 episodes – 9 to 10 months a year – and we were exhausted. You finish shooting, and the last thing you want to do is go back to work. You want those 3 months off because you’re tired – it’s a grueling shooting schedule.
On ‘B&B,’ we shoot so fast and eight episodes a week, so we have to always be on our A-game. There’s really no time to make certain adjustments. We usually shoot a scene in one take, maybe two or three only if needed.
I told myself a while back, ‘Love what you do, but don’t fall in love with what you do.’ That way you won’t be brokenhearted if ever it gets canceled five episodes in – which has happened to me.
I suffer from manic-depressive disorder, and I’ve chosen not to take medication for it. Because of that, every once in a while I go through manic episodes and really depressed episodes.
I’m not really a science-fiction fan, I quite like the idea of getting away from the science-fiction side of it, for two episodes. It was lovely, it was a super story and great fun.
I think the least stereotypical gay character on television is probably Matt LeBlanc on ‘Episodes.’ He just plays it so straight-faced. They never talk about the fact that he’s such a huge gay person.
Funny enough, the first time I watched ‘Arrow’ was because Audrey Marie Anderson, who plays Lyla, was in my episodes of ‘The Walking Dead’ with me.
