Josh Gad Quotes

Writing pilots is such a specific thing. It's not even really writing TV shows. A pilot is its own beast.

Universal rushed us. We started shooting without a script that was totally completed.

I've hung out in the writer's room a few times, but the fact is we've got such a good writing staff, I don't want to get my peanut butter fingerprints on anything.

Television and movies just take so long. If you pitch a show or develop a project, it can be a year before your show even gets on the air, if it gets picked up.

Most TV shows are writing the next episode while you're directing the one you're doing, and they're trying to figure out what they're going to do, and they're putting it all together.

Because I work in television, I always knew that I loved working with writers. It's very collaborative. You're always in a room full of writers.

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

One of the things that's, I think, hard in television is that there's a certain sameness to a lot of television because you're working in a very constricted box, and the box is defined by the amount of money you have to spend and the amount of time you have to get ready.

It's so hard to make a comedy pilot and have a cool idea.

I think it's not uncommon for new television shows to spend certainly the first year, but without a doubt, like, the first eight or ten episodes, kind of figuring out what the show is.

Like, to do a pilot, you don't know what's going to happen with it.

With TV, you just have to finish the days and get the episodes out. And it's always going to be an impossible schedule. That's the funny thing with TV that not a lot of people realize.

As actors, if you get a pilot on HBO or on USA, your odds are good that it's going to get picked up.

When you make a pilot, you've never seen the show before; you don't know what it is.

I've never made a show that goes right on the air and is perfect. People don't remember, but the original 'Goldbergs' pilot was poorly received, and I had to retool that for ABC, where it eventually became a hit.

When you work in a writers room for a showrunner, you serve that story, and you serve that showrunner. I don't think it should be called writing; I think it should be called rendering content. Because you are there to render the content that is agreed upon in the room, and you're serving the voice of the main storyteller, which is the showrunner.

When I was working on 'Deadwood', it was understood that the script was a work in progress, and when we got to set, everyone would kind of work on it together.

I've never been in a writer's room.

I don't think that I would go into the writers' room because they work really hard and I feel like I'm already working really hard to shoot my part of the show. Also, I haven't written in a writers' room before, it's kinda intimidating to walk in there.

Making a film is hard because you're not dealing with the intangible. When you're writing, it's perfect because it's only in your head and then you have to take it into the physical world and that's where things drop off and things fall apart and you have to fix them.

Normally we go in, we do a series and then that's it, we're axed!

In TV, you're a 'writer for hire.' That means you're trying to guess what your boss wants and delivering that story. There's a lot of spitballing. The big thing is 'breaking story,' which means coming up with a story. You do it by episode and put it all up on a board.

My role on 'Silicon Valley' was so small that I didn't have a lot of influence anyway in the show. There are four guys who really write that show and run that show and then six or eight hanging out in a room kicking in a few bits.

You get the initial script, and then things sort of change here and there, but the whole thing is this sort of mushy collaboration, which I love.

I started out working as a script editor and storyliner.