Raphael Bob-Waksberg Quotes

What's so cool about movies is once you're done with the movie, you put it away and come up with a whole new different idea with different characters and a different world. But in TV, you build these characters, and you build this world, and then you're there for however long you do the show.

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.

TV has a three storyline structure, but 'The Killing' takes on that structure with such ambition.

The difference between movies and TV is that in TV you have to have a trauma every week, but that event may not be the biggest event in the characters' lives.

A long-running TV series is a beast in that it demands you stick to one character over a long haul.

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.

What's great in theater is that you can sustain the arc of a character for a full three hours, whereas in film or TV, you have to create that arc in little pieces, and usually out of sequence.

All TV shows are basically part of the same storyline.

One of the things you have to be acutely aware of when shooting episodes out of order is your character's relationship with the other characters.

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.

Hill Street Blues might have been the first television show that had a memory. One episode after another was part of a cumulative experience shared by the audience.

It's all just one film to me. Just different chapters.

With 'Darkly Dreaming Dexter,' we as a group of writers had to take a rather thin novel and spread it out over the course of 12 episodes, and not only 12 episodes, but lay in story for everyone that's going to take you through five years.

For me, as an audience member, I'm always most engaged by serialized storytelling, so as an actor, the thing that I take away from it is how much fun it is to perform a serialized story.

TV, particularly network television, gives you a much greater opportunity to tell a long-form story, to develop a character and keep it detailed. Film, by its nature, is more finite.

The danger of serialization is that you almost get into a monotone - where they all have the same beat and pace, and it's all one long thing - and when you can kind of do this interesting mixture of episodic and serialization, you can kind of take the audience on a more interesting journey.

With a film, you just don't have time to build sympathy for the character. But I think we're moving away from that in TV. With TV, you have a little more leeway to allow them to rise and fall and rise again and be much more complicated beings.

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.

It's the reason I love doing TV - revisiting stories and characters and the length of the story arcs.

There's something inherently more appealing about the idea that you could reveal and tell stories about characters over the course of a TV season - 13 or 26 episodes, whatever it might be - than in the course of one two-hour movie. You can do so many more novelistic kinds of things on a TV show - with time, with gradual development of relationships, and so on - than you could possibly do in a movie. And that is very appealing.

You can watch an episode of Friends or an episode of Law & Order and just drop in, but you're not going to in the middle of Season 4, Episode 5 of Lost. It's like picking up a Harry Potter book and flipping to a chapter. You have to read it from beginning to end.

I could make up characters till the cows came home. Plot's what hard. Very hard.

First of all, I don't dislike direct storytelling - people seem to think that about my games! Actually, the truth is, I'm just not good at implementing direct narrative in my games.

I'm a huge believer in story being this invisible scaffolding that no one ever recognizes or realizes is actually making the audience engaged in what's going on. There is no formula for it.

When a show starts out, you're immediately trying to identify your goodies and baddies, and trying to place people in your mind where you think they belong.