I knew David Lynch going to television was going to be something. It was either going to not work, nobody was going to get it and it would disappear, or it was going to be something special and really stand out.
I think 'Pose' is really a groundbreaking television show because we're telling stories about family and love through people that society has always believed were incapable of having that or being a part of that.
Arguably, the first five years of 'Saturday Night Live' were some of the most radical things ever seen on television. When NBC said, 'Okay, you can do a show from 11:30 to 1 on Saturday night,' they didn't think anyone would watch. It was like giving a piece of the candy store to the kids.
Right when 'Liv and Maddie' had started, there was no roadmap for how to do a show where one girl played two. It's just not something that is often done, so we had nothing to refer to.
The fact that people still talk and obsess about 'Twin Peaks', more than twenty years after the fact, is a great validation for what we thought we had going at the time.
Yeah, even a black comedy. Where it's a little eerie. I'd love to do that. But there are about three really fabulous ones on the air now and I don't know if I can do any better than that. I'd like to sort of forge new ground.
'Political Animals' was before its time: a little darker, a little edgier. The audience wasn't ready for it.
'Chappelle's Show' was like the Tupac of TV shows. It came out, it got everybody's attention, it was a bright shining star, but it burned out, and for some strange reason, it burned out quick.
I've been in three sort of... I mean, I'd say they're groundbreaking series, if only because of the creators. One was 'Max Headroom', another was 'The Larry Sanders Show', and the third was 'Arrested Development'.
With 'The Simpsons,' people didn't know what they were gonna see. They didn't have a clue.
I've been lucky between 'Buffy,' 'Angel,' 'Alias,' and then 'Lost.' The thing they all have in common is that they were all fearless. They were not afraid to be different and try something different. Even if you didn't know that it was going to work, just try to do something new and fresh.
I would love to see Carl Reiner working in the arena today. He did some marvelous things on our show in the early '60s when it was a little edgy. We did shows about blacks, a couple, three of those. Some thought-provoking stuff.
Man, 'Hill Street Blues' was on when I was 12, and I remember feeling I'd never seen anything like it. It was that far ahead of its time, with dark characters you loved.
Television has - particularly at the HBO level in the United States - become a completely new genre. Something like Deadwood or The Wire is a whole new thing - there was no equivalent to that medium before. It's like a new way of telling stories.
