Marc Guggenheim Quotes

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.

I think the context of an hour-long drama gives breathing space that you don't get in a film.

In film, because you know where the ending is, characters can change, but in television, you substitute revelation for change, and that can be hard to pull off.

In a crime novel, if you are going to have a big revelation in chapter 30, you have to plant the information in chapters three and 11.

I'm not a fan of endless mystery in storytelling - I like to know where the mythology's going; I like to get there in an exciting, fast-paced way - enough that there's a really clear, aggressive direction to where it's going, to pay off mystery and reward the audiences loyalty.

In fiction, it's a big challenge to keep the reader in one place for so long.

Sometimes, you don't realize that something is actually a sidetrack for the story, or it takes the tension out of a scene.

From beginning to end it's about keeping the energy and the intensity of the story and not doing too much and not doing too little, but just enough so people stay interested and stay involved in the characters.

One of the things I admire about longer stories is the way writers can work with dead time and slower, more idle moments - not only can they feel expansive, they feel lived-in; the unhurried pacing often makes the endings even more resonant and surprising for me.

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.

A good opening and a good ending make for a good film provide they come close together.

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.

Sometimes they keep us in the dark, but it's TV, so sometimes they keep us in the dark because even they don't know yet. You know what I mean? So, it sort of develops as it goes along and according to various needs that arise.

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.

You can have the greatest characters in the world and write beautifully, but if nothing's happening, the story falls on its face pretty quickly.

Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience.

You've either got to find a way to make your continuing characters insteresting without making them maudlin or overwrought, or you've got to put more emphasis on the suspects.

There are a lot of shows that have secrets and string people along and use the secrets of the narrative engine to keep people coming back every week. I don't know if those programs even have an answer. I don't know how they build their shows.

'Battlestar Galactica' executive producer Ronald D. Moore told Tor.com that the series finale of 'Battlestar' turned out exactly as he'd intended, but there were several alternate endings that were considered before the final version was produced.

What I find frustrating about scripted television is that it's rare that you are surprised by how you feel about the character, or how you feel about the show.

We always talk about how the first several seasons were faithful to the books, and anybody who wanted to could go onto Wikipedia and learn Ned Stark gets beheaded or about The Red Wedding, and most people don't want to know - because why ruin a story?

I like snappy dialogue and short descriptions and lots of action.

I try to naturally keep things to a manageable storytelling length, which is about two hours, so you try to cut out anything extraneous.

When you tell a story, there are imperatives of structure, of style, of pacing and all of this, that are there simply because you want to make it a good story. When do you introduce your characters? When do you put them onstage, when do you take them off the stage? How do you weave the different threads of the narrative together?

I think one of the reasons for the success of 'Breaking Bad,' and now for 'Better Call Saul,' is that we have been blessed by AMC and Sony with enough time to figure things out.