After ‘Freaks and Geeks,’ I dealt with several producers who wanted to cover up all my beauty marks, every single mole on my body. They tried to cover them on my first two episodes of ‘Dawson’s Creek,’ and it just looked ridiculous, so I had to put my foot down. But it’s not something I’m insecure about.
We’ve heard from many teachers that they used episodes of Star Trek and concepts of Star Trek in their science classrooms in order to engage the students.
I was in two episodes playing Christopher Reeve’s character’s emissary. They wanted to have my character announce Dr Swan’s death, which I thought was exploitative.
JJ Abrams is definitely a guy that when he calls, you want to answer. He’s incredibly focused. When he was shooting the pilot on ‘Lost,’ we’d do a take and he’d go back to his tent and be working on the first episodes of ‘Lost’ as well as the cliffhanger for the eighth season of ‘Alias.’ He’s an incredible multitasker.
There are writers’ rooms that will write episodes all together, who will break into little groups and write certain scenes. Everyone’s process can be a little bit malleable. Everyone tries to get into a groove or find what works for their room.
The gods have chosen to entertain me with chronic eyestrain headaches. Very poisonous episodes. So I don’t do a lot of reading anymore except on tape.
Although there were only about 24 episodes made it seems to run forever. They take a couple of episodes and put them together, making a feature film once in a while. I had good fun making the series.
‘Humsafar’ is addictive; it’s a good nasha to have. I remember, when the show was on here in Pakistan, my friends would keep asking me what’s going to happen next. And those who didn’t see it when it was aired the first time watched all episodes back-to-back because they found it very gripping.
With network, shows are pulled half the time after three episodes whether they’re good or they’re not good. It’s a numbers game. With cable, they can take a lot more liberties.
I’ve always had a show that went seven episodes or 13 episodes or whatever. And I’ve never had a show that’s gone past a first season. It really is a lot of work.
I’ve always had this dream that if people could pay me to watch and review old episodes of ‘The Golden Girls,’ that would be something really special.
I would never watch ‘Lost’ on TV; I’d just wait until I could get at least five or six episodes in a row. Saved myself a lot of anxiety that way.
There were episodes where I would wear seven or eight outfits. It took a lot of time to get those together. What the character wears is very essential to how I create the character.
I kind of joke that creating franchises is a lot like directing pilot episodes of TV series. You set a look and feel and kind of pass it on.
In the time you make one series of 9-10 episodes, you can make 3 films.
One of my biggest and most influential was ‘The Golden Girls.’ That show, I remember specific episodes.
It was like an older but better version of Young Talent Time because we had more time to spend on it. There were three guys and three girls and we made thirteen episodes that were sold in the United States and Canada.
I feel like some sort of fiction-writing hobo, jumping trains and always hoping I’ll find a good place to start a fire in the next town. And I keep having these panicky episodes where I corner my husband and rant at him: ‘I don’t have anywhere to write! I can’t write! I don’t have a place to write!’
Ten episodes goes by really quickly, especially when you’ve got a really tough shooting schedule of seven-day episodes.
It was a very difficult time, 1984. ‘Happy Days’ ended. I said, ‘There’s no way I can be a producer.’ My attorney said, ‘You’ll learn.’ The first thing we sold was the ‘MacGyver’ television series. We shot 139 episodes between 1985 and 1992.
We worked under a lot of pressure… three days to do an episode, sometimes two in a week, 39 episodes a year.
I went to Target once and picked up three seasons of ’24’ – what I call the Jack Bauer power hour – and watched 72 episodes in ten days.
Before I do episodes of ‘The Good Wife,’ I talk to the director and say, ‘I’m trusting you to let me know if it’s too much! I won’t be offended.’ So I put myself in their hands, and most of the time they let me do my thing, but sometimes they’ll say, ‘Let’s try this.’
The concept of doing holiday episodes is a huge part of what’s fantastic about doing TV. And viewers agree; you see the numbers going up for holiday episodes.
In TV, you don’t know everything. The writers only give you scripts before you shoot the episodes. They keep you on your nerve.
‘Murder in the First’ takes 12 episodes to explore the crime and the issues surrounding it, all in the hopes of answering the question, ‘How did we get to this point?’
For most of my childhood, even through college, there was a lot of feeling very alone. I loved TV, so when those very special episodes of anything came, or when certain characters reflected the world I lived in, I felt connected.
I think there’s something beautifully old fashioned about waiting all week then sitting down and watching something on television together. I’m generation box set, accustomed to binging on multiple episodes at a time, which is fun but quite a solitary pursuit because you do it alone.
I know I don’t want to do another single-camera show. It’s so time-consuming. I did a couple of episodes of ‘Whitney’ as her mom, but I have been laying low. I love being with my kids and being a mom.
One of the striking features of the early episodes of AMC’s hit television show ‘Mad Men’ is the similarities in the lifestyle enjoyed by the lowest paid members of Don Draper’s advertising company and its wealthy partners.
Looking back now on our workload, I just shake my head at our pace. ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ was my first series, so I didn’t know anything about that when I started. I just assumed it was normal to make 26 episodes a year on a seven-day shooting schedule.
I’ve often reflected on this in the past weeks as I’ve been following the presidential campaign: Very often, I thought it would have been great for both of these guys to sit down and be force-fed a couple of dozen episodes of Star Trek.
It used to be that you had to do a certain number of episodes to hit syndication in order to try to keep a show on, because it’s important to the network because it sells good commercial time. That’s really not how HBO does things.
No director directs ‘Game of Thrones’ without reading all the episodes and knowing what’s going on. All the episodes are written in advance, so you can do that, which is an important point.
