Sprague Grayden Quotes

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

There's one thing about TV that I really think is true. If you find the right cast and the right writers, and you got some chemistry going, even if a show is taking a little while to find an audience, if you keep it there, that audience will find it. Because that's what happened with 'Cheers.'

That's why I love doing television because it's something that fans and viewers can sit down each week and get to know your character and get to know the show and get to know what's going on and fall in love with you all over again, like they did in previous shows.

Network television is all talk. I think there should be visuals on a show, some sense of mystery to it, connections that don't add up.

'Homeland' really is one of those shows where they start to write more or less depending on what's kind of going on in a relationship between characters.

'Bionic Woman' changed direction too much from episode to episode, which I think is why it lost momentum.

Sometimes shows get into their 5th and 6th season and you're like, where can you go? But 'Dexter' is still so strong, it's really refreshing.

The heart and soul of network programming is series programming, the weekly repetition of characters you like having in your house.

TV now, you have to plan it: you structure it for binge watching, meaning you structure the whole season like a three-act play. You have a first act - the first third of the season - second act is the middle third, and you structure it like that.

My characters are not thinking about the act breaks. They're thinking about what they need to do to move forward. As long as I focus on that, the story starts to progress. As soon as I think, 'We're 20 pages in, something better blow up,' we're in trouble.

Summer is a great opportunity for all of cable. People love to find original episodes.

It's funny: We have so many shows and so many channels and so many things to occupy people as entertainment, especially with a show like 'Scandal,' which is clearly a hit, with a lot of heat around it - but every once in a while, people will say, 'What are you doing?' and I'll say 'Scandal,' and they'll have no idea what I'm talking about.

If you don't spend the time you need on developing characters and finding stories, complicated stories, the audience gets tired because they think they're seeing the same thing again and again.

There's an arc to an action sequence, and you need to come out the other end knowing your character better, and maybe the story has moved forward in a compelling way.

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

It would be far less interesting, after 'The Empire Strikes Back,' to have an hour-long movie in between 'Empire' and 'Return of the Jedi,' where Luke is training. It's so much cooler to cut from end of 'Empire' to beginning of 'Return,' where he's become the Jedi.

I like to watch all those shows that shouldn't be on the air - reality shows.

In 'Serena,' stuff happens, then nastier stuff, without ever engaging the viewer's rooting interest or sick fear. Sometimes it's a question of sloppiness on the set or in the editing room.

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.

I think NBC got a little reluctant to get behind single-camera shows after 'Scrubs' didn't do what they thought it was going to do following 'Friends.'

There's a lot of successful procedural shows that are out there. A lot of them are very successful. I just know there's an audience out there that wants character also.

A typical TV show is always about protecting the franchise - it's all about stretching it out as long as you can take it. And it's about taking the characters in any given hour as far as you can take them, but then resetting them more or less back to zero so at the beginning of the next week, so they're still the character you know and love.

I'm always in awe at how fast television is and how quickly you're called upon to be 100 percent invested in a character with the lines.

With TV season structures - and I'm a huge TV watcher - you look at shows like 'Breaking Bad,' which is my favorite show of all time, and 'The Sopranos,' which is pretty high up there as well, and there was that thing where, every season, Walter White would go up a level, but there would be a new bad.

I can't imagine soaps will ever stop, because people will always watch as long as they have great stories and characters. But the soaps will have to keep evolving, won't they?