Tate Donovan Quotes

'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.

'Game of Thrones' is shot on a very similar kind of schedule to a TV show, but there's a lot more time and focus put into the script.

I've never had a series that's gone past 12 episodes.

Ten episodes goes by really quickly, especially when you've got a really tough shooting schedule of seven-day episodes.

I was a diehard fan of '24' since the beginning. But being on the show, there was stuff I never thought about as a viewer, like, wow, it's going to be a single day for 10 months out of your life - you have to look exactly the same every day.

If you go to pilot then you are probably going to go to series. That's my feeling about it.

I think the rigors of a TV schedule are brutal and 'Six Feet Under' wasn't a network schedule. We did 13 shows, we didn't do 22. I don't know how people do that. I really don't. I mean the shows are shorter, but wow, it's quite a discipline.

It takes a week to do a sitcom in Hollywood. I do a show a day in my studio, three or four shows a week.

Sometimes doing a movie for a short period of time is better than committing eight months to a television show.

You never say never, but I don't think I'd want to do a long-running series.

I've never seen a schedule where you just go in two hours almost every day of the week and then all day on one day. Then you shoot it at night with an audience and you're out of there.

Well, TV series tie you up. You can't do films while you're doing a TV series.

I got a series with the WB next year. We start shooting in July. It's going to be called Safe Harbor, and it's an hour show. It's a Spelling show and will follow 7th Heaven.

I really wasn't on the Dallas set much. I did three or four episodes so I didn't see too much.

When I auditioned for 'Jessie,' I knew that Disney Channel basically will do 100 episodes of a show if it's a hit; they'll stick with something. It's a great network to work with because they make a nice big commitment to a show.

We shoot double episodes in 15 days in Los Angeles.

I didn't want to commit to a TV show.

I think a long-term TV show is probably not for me, but doing a few years of something could be interesting.

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.

We did four months on 'Line of Duty' from beginning to end, and that would be a long theater run.

We shoot 'Hustle' for 12 to 16 weeks, so that's how long I'm here each year. I've always loved London. I lived here for three years back in the Seventies, when I did a TV series, 'The Protectors,' for Lew Grade.

When you're working on a television series, you only get a very short off-season. The scheduling of TV is relentless.

I'll cop to this: so much of doing a 22-episode show is just keeping your head above water.

It's an interesting thing to come to New York and do a television show. You're doing 10 hours of content in four and a half months. Eighty-hour weeks are par for the course.

'Law & Order' is a six-month shoot. Everything has to be crammed in. I had so much fun, but it wasn't a holiday. We had seriously long days, and we'd finish at 8 P.M. and start again at 7 A.M. We were doing six-day weeks, which sometimes tripped onto the seventh. But I loved it all.