Donal Logue Quotes

The thing about TV is it's a meritocracy. I love that aspect of it - and I've had shows that have gone on the air and been canceled. I've seen the good and the bad of it.

I watch 'Sons of Anarchy' and 'Game of Thrones' and 'The Walking Dead' and think, 'I want to create that kind of television!'

I've worked on 30-something different TV shows, and most of the people can't stand each other.

The same issue is happening on a show like Everybody Loves Raymond now, which is in its eighth year and struggling to come up with good stories. It'll be interesting to see how they do. The bottom line is, it starts with the writers and ends with the writers.

Networks don't want a show with a continuing story. There's no backend potential.

Doing a TV show, you're on an assembly line and it's as cut and dry as that. There are some shows that are exceptions. There are producers that want really special things.

The way they do things in the U.S., if you have a show, you'll option your actors for five, six or seven seasons. In the U.K., we just don't have the financing to be able to do that.

We do 32 episodes a season and will have shot 267 episodes by the end of the ninth season... It's impossible to sell that many episodes in the foreign market.

The lifespan of any show is to end in cancellation.

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.

There are not that many people who can say they have been on a show long enough to leave it. Usually, you don't have a choice. The show gets canceled. There are very few people who live in the rare air of being able to leave a show while it is still in production.

In the movies, you typically do get to see the script beforehand. TV is different because there are a lot of scripts in the future that you haven't seen. You commit to a show, and you have to believe in the showrunner and their team and the stories they're going to tell.

Honestly, it's a sad truth, but whenever a show is about to go off air, you start getting hints because the work environment and quality changes.

I've been in very protective shows: 'How to Get Away With Murder,' 'Vampire Diaries,' and even 'Gracepoint' and 'Supernatural.' They really protect their stories because they don't want any leaks.

I've been asked to direct pilots for a lot of shows.

My experience in TV is that it takes time for shows to find their way.

Most of TV works this way: You try to get something up and running, and once you do, you just try to keep it going, because there's a lot of money involved.

There's so much great TV and I always thought it would be such a fun little sideway to make money and then not have to worry about my films making a lot of money.

It's not that writing staffs don't change at all, but they don't change very much. Directors are freelancers. There are directors who do five or 10 episodes of a show every year for years, but most directors are freelance, they come and go.

The thing about working on a TV show is that it becomes, very quickly, all consuming.

To me, television is one of the most exciting things going on right now, as far as content goes. Some of these shows that are on television are better than any of the movies out there.

Television is also a great tool for women. As you know, the best female roles are often on television, so it's a very exciting time. I've really embraced it. The pace is great, but also not so great sometimes. You feel like you have to make sure to pay attention, at all times, to not let anything slip through.

All my TV shows are done live in front of audiences, and all the material I take on the road and travel with them test them for hundreds and hundreds of shows before I shoot them for TV.

That was something that I learned from Alan Ball from “Six Feet Under." He didn”t really like to have too many pop culture references because they don”t really hold up after a few years.

On most TV shows, you work on a set and do some location.