Carlton Cuse Quotes

I think that 'The Shield' was a phenomenal series finale.

I'm going to have to class 'True Detective''s first season with so many other shows that were great until the final episode(s) and then lost their way. I still love this show, but I would have preferred no ending at all to this one.

I just don't know that a TV show demands a movie ending.

I wrote Steve Carell's last episode. I think it was a really good episode, but there's always a tension between what's good for the series and what's good for an episode, because the more closure you put on an episode, the more significant feeling it is.

I always love writing the third book in a series because you get to tie up all the threads that you put out in the first two books. You finally let people know what really happens and reveal all the secrets and bring certain characters together.

That's one of the reasons why 'Lost' has to end: because we can't sit around and envision, 'What is the flashback for Jack in year nine?' It doesn't realistically exist.

Would I have watched another season of 'Breaking Bad'? Of course. Would I have watched another two seasons of 'Breaking Bad'? Of course. The fact that I would easily have watched much, much more than I got made the ending so much more poignant and stronger and better for me.

There are so many shows that go on endlessly until they lose their original spark, or mysteries that are cancelled before they ever get a chance to payoff.

I would encourage people that, if you are waiting for the end of 'The Office,' to re-tune in right away. It is the beginning of the end, where we start to break down what's going on with this documentary and see behind the scenes with who is involved.

I can never kind of fathom a character's journey beyond the moment when you go to black, any more than when people ask me what Jason Patric did with the tape recorder at the end of 'Narc,' you know what I mean? Even in 'Blood, Guts,' like, what happens down the road with these characters?

A lot of shows peak after a series and never get it back, but 'Breaking Bad' keeps the tension up all the time.

I don't begin a novel or a screenplay until I know the ending. And I don't mean only that I have to know what happens. I mean that I have to hear the actual sentences. I have to know what atmosphere the words convey.

I personally think the best ideas for TV shows - at least comedies - are very low-fi ideas. High concepts often sell pitches in movies and TV, but, especially in TV when you're talking about hopefully a 100 or 150 episode proposition, those concepts just burn off, and then you're stuck with nothing.

Series finales have that responsibility to leave you feeling good about entire series. You want to feel like the viewer closes the book satisfied. And if you strike out on the finale it skews how you feel about the entire series.

We feel like 'Lost' deserved a real resolution, not a 'snow globe, waking up in bed, it's all been a dream, cut to black' kind of ending. We thought that would be kind of a betrayal to an audience that's been on this journey for six years. We thought that was not the right ending for our show.

If you watched 'Lost,' sometimes the episodes were crazy good, and sometimes you're like, 'That one was just sorta there.'

I believe that 99 percent of successful TV shows change an immense amount from the pilot to the tenth or twelfth episode.

The challenge is always to find the good place to end the book. The rule I follow with myself is that every book should end where the next book would logically begin. I know that some readers wish that literally all of the threads would be neatly tied off and snipped, but life just doesn't work that way.

For me, utter failure is to make a film that people pay their money to go see and they don't like.

I don't think 'Cocktail' was a perfect critical success, but it touched a vein in our culture.

For me, as a fan, when I read book series, I tend to be the most judgmental of the last book.

You don't have to resolve every problem of the book at the end, but you do have to resolve some.

People spend hundreds of millions of dollars to make movies that don't do anything. I mean, no one's talking about 'Pacific Rim' today. No one's talking about 'The Lone Ranger,' and those were $100 million movies that didn't have nearly the impact that 'Sharknado' did.

Personally, I think it would have been really nice, if 'Lost' had just one season.

It's not about creating 22 episodes indefinitely for as long as you can do.