I always have a sense of where I want to end each season, emotionally and relationship wise and with the theme, and I'm always able to hit that.
It was somewhere in doing the last season of 'Leverage' that John Rogers and I became confident that we had developed an all-new production technique where we could put more on the screen with very little money. So we started to get more comfortable with the idea of trying to tackle 'The Librarians.'
I've been in the position where Liverpool needed to win on the last day to reach the Champions League. In May 2000, we needed to beat Bradford, who were fighting to avoid relegation, at Valley Parade but lost an awful game 1-0.
When you're the lead actor in a drama, you have 2 1/2 months at the end of a season to do other projects, and everything has to get done in that time.
No matter how well you do in the regular season, it has to be capped off with a championship to really mark your legacy in the game.
It's definitely intense to walk away from at the end of each season.
After 'Star Trek,' I was the commander on 'Stargate Atlantis,' the final season, and once my character had become a good commander, I was sorry that the show didn't last beyond that.
On any serialized show, you're going to have through-lines that take you through the season, and you're going to have individual arcs that resolve themselves in shorter order.
I'm very very high on 'Ozark.' I was very excited about it. The season three finale blew my mind.
You know, when it was done originally, they always had to fight to keep it going at the end of each season. Now, The Odd Couple has become part of our language and culture.
The last thing I thought that was utterly brilliant was the season finale of the last season of 'Homeland'. I was just completely and utterly speechless and I think my friend was poking me going: "What did you think?"
I was watching the last season of 'Mad Men,' and they're now so in their characters and they're so comfortable in their characters, and they're doing such good work. That can only happen from doing it over and over, and developing a character over seven years.
I'm no stranger to joining a show in the third season. I joined 'Lost Girl' at the same stage, and that was a wonderful experience.
I like the idea of shows where I don't know where I'll be at the end of the season.
Normally we go in, we do a series and then that's it, we're axed!
I don't like watching shows where all of a sudden you're like, what happened? They shot the last season in Las Vegas?
It was a fight for a very long time. After the end of the first season, all that was done.
We had an amazing experience shooting the first season of 'Leverage' with such a talented cast and crew and with the full support of TNT behind us.
We want to chase and seal the championship title. The decisive thing is to be at the top at the end of the season.
I've always said at the beginning of every single season of the show when I was running the show in the writers' room, "This is the last season, so let's smoke 'em if we've got 'em."
We literally had all 10 teams alive for a playoff position in the final week of the season. That outstanding balance and those close races created a major surge in attendance in the last month of the season.
My character on 'The Sopranos' was specific to being a single mother and being from Jersey. And being part of that season finale... wow. That show is always going to be world-renowned and iconic.
How that works is our first season was the year we had a threatened writers' strike, so what we did was that instead of doing 22 episodes, we did 30. We put 10 in the bank.
When I went to AC Milan, they were four points away from the relegation zone, and by the end of the season, we were just one goal away from being in the Europa League.
Particularly in the final season [of Fringe], when we were shooting seven-day episodes with a reduced budget and big special effects, the team was so polished, by then, that we were able to do it and, I think, with incredible results.
