Format Constraints Quotes

I don't write songs thinking about formats, where is it going to get played, who am I gonna please, what's the outlet for it.

Cable series have more time to focus on characters, and a structure that allows for a development in character as you go along. Network shows have a pressure of time and space that is completely different.

With pop music, the format dictates the form to a big degree. Just think of the pop single. It has endured as a form even in the download age because bands conform to a strict format, and work, often very productively, within the parameters.

I didn't want to be told what to do. I don't want to water down my music to fit into their formats. I know what rock and roll is to me, but everything's turning into one big commercial.

I relish the eight-hour format of a single season because it gives you time to do that.

I think the tone of the show has certainly changed over the years, because it's really, really hard to do something different when you have a show going on as long as this has.

But we were really locked in to that kind of format, and as the '90s wore on, it became for me more solidified, in that sense that there weren't as many of those magical shows that were just magic all the way through as there had been in earlier years.

It's a challenge to work a character's arc into a format in which you only have a very limited amount of time to grow and develop a character.

In network TV, you have to present the box before you can step outside it.

We do want the freedom to move scenes from episode to episode to episode. And we do want the freedom to move writing from episode to episode to episode, because as it starts to come in and as you start to look at it as a five-hour movie just like you would in a two-hour movie, move a scene from the first 30 minutes to maybe 50 minutes in. In a streaming series, you would now be in a different episode. It's so complicated, and we're so still using the rules that were built for episodic television that we're really trying to figure it out.