Joshua Jackson Quotes

The 13-episode model lends itself to a more serialised format, which is nice and gives writers a chance to breathe some space into it.

I love the long-form format of television. I love being able to develop a character, over a long period of time.

In film and theater, you know the story and the journey from beginning to end, but with TV, you can keep peeling away layers and exploring a new world each week.

You have to think about storytelling over the long haul: what is going to engage an audience for, potentially, years and how characters can become deeply involving for an audience.

In film, because you know where the ending is, characters can change, but in television, you substitute revelation for change, and that can be hard to pull off.

If you create a good story that has a lot of story value... I think audiences like that. It's why they stick with the same TV show over and over.

I think the tricky balance, the most important thing more than the horror is to have a compelling story, compelling drama, a show about great characters that you care about and you want to come back every week to see what they're up to.

That's what's so great about television. You're able to tell this long story, where you couldn't really do that in a film because you have to tell a story in an hour and a half or two hours.

As an actor, I think a mistake that any storyteller can make is to play the ending.

Television provides the opportunity for an ongoing story - the opportunity to meld the cast and the characters and a world, and to spend more time there.

There are a lot of shows that have secrets and string people along and use the secrets of the narrative engine to keep people coming back every week. I don't know if those programs even have an answer. I don't know how they build their shows.

We figured the audience would want good stories, great art, wonderful characters, people you could fall in love with that we would immediately put through hell.

What I have learned from working on those great shows is what is the DNA that makes them so deeply involving and interesting for an audience over a long period of time. So much has to do with character, complexity, and sophistication.

Fans want to see a story with characters, and they want to see a story.

It was unpredictable, good storytelling that brought you back each week.

A whole film is just about arriving at a moment where you hopefully transfer some feeling to the audience.

I think what good television does well is that it shows characters evolving.

I think the context of an hour-long drama gives breathing space that you don't get in a film.

What I took away from my 'Flashforward' experience is that when you're doing a serialized mythology show, you put your foot on the gas, and you do not take it off.

You can sustain visual beauty and innovative visual ideas for a certain length of time, but in a two-hour experience, which is really what movies are, usually audiences - whether they know it or not - most want an emotional connection to character.

The fun thing about doing origin stories is you are introducing the audience to characters.

Even though shows like NYPD Blue are soaps in my opinion, but they're individualized to an extent that you can still follow what's going on if you miss a week.

There's this thing in TV that I find hysterical where the writers and creators will ask us if you want to know what happens to your character or if you want to experience it episode by episode. In the theatre, we always know the ending; we always know where the character is going.

Well, here's what I'll say: The storytellers of 'Lost' have taken us on a pretty great journey, and there have been questions along the way, and criticisms along the way, but if you look at the totality of the show, or the experience of it as a whole, I think as long as you look at it from that perspective you'll be happy.

Sympathetic characters usually have a voice. They usually don't have any trouble being heard.