Serial Storytelling Quotes

With TV season structures - and I'm a huge TV watcher - you look at shows like 'Breaking Bad,' which is my favorite show of all time, and 'The Sopranos,' which is pretty high up there as well, and there was that thing where, every season, Walter White would go up a level, but there would be a new bad.

Everything you've ever read of mine is first-draft. This is one of the peculiarities of the comics field. By the time you're working on chapter three of your masterwork, chapter one is already in print. You can't go back and suddenly decide to make this character a woman, or have this one fall out of a window.

I got spoiled on 'Breaking Bad.' Playing the same guy for four or five seasons, you get to really explore who the character is.

One of the problems with episodic television of any color is that everything has got to be okay at the end of the episode so it can start again next week.

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.

That's why I love doing television because it's something that fans and viewers can sit down each week and get to know your character and get to know the show and get to know what's going on and fall in love with you all over again, like they did in previous shows.

I don't know if we would have stuff like 'Deadwood' and 'Boardwalk Empire' if 'Twin Peaks' had never happened.

The thing about TV is you kind of have an endless canvas. You can always keep going.

I think that comics and television, as mediums, go hand in hand. Both tell long-form, continuing stories that are parsed out into little chapters and, if are successful, continue for years and years. What that means to me, as a writer, is it tells stories of transformation and evolution as characters.

To me, there's still nothing more thrilling than, every week, people getting to see another chapter in this story that you're telling.

It's the reason I love doing TV - revisiting stories and characters and the length of the story arcs.

Storytelling takes many forms, and even feature-length storytelling is often 90 minutes or two hours. There's nothing stopping us from trying to do that on a week-to-week basis.

The advantage of being the creator of the character is I know them better than anybody, I like to think. But the reality one has to deal with in a serial collaborative medium like comics is that you're not the only one who writes the character.

Crime shows are really popular, in general, but usually, at the end of every episode, you have to let go of the people that you've invested in and then, the next week, get somebody else.

Even if an episode is self-contained, the preceding episodes always affect how the audience takes it in.

There are very few horror shows, where you have a long running arc. Most horror shows play as a sort of an anthology. Buffy - a terrific show - had the-demon-of-the-week. Twilight Zone - X Files - these things had an anthology approach. Our show is a long running drama with the same creatures every week.

It took me a while to understand the meaning of a franchise: the reasons why you see lawyer, doctor, cop shows. It's not because anyone in their right mind says, 'You know, what's the most fascinating thing in the world?' It's because you need something new that happens every week in a frame.

What I worry about is working in this serial medium, where people are talking about your stories before they're done, we have this instant feedback loop now. I'm very active on Tumblr and I have a very active engagement with readers and I love it, but I don't want to start writing to try to please someone else. I don't want my meter to get skewed.

For me, one of the most beautiful and rewarding aspects of serial reality TV is that characters can move freely along a spectrum of heroism and villainy.

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.

I love the long-form format of television. I love being able to develop a character, over a long period of time.

For film and theater, you know how the story starts; you know how the story ends. With TV, you don't. It's literally like living real life in character.

People like continuity, and the good old cliffhanger every week is something they enjoy. I enjoy it - I don't want to dip into just one episode when I turn on the TV.

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.

A lot of people always look back at 'Twin Peaks' and say that was the start of this explosion we've had in good television drama, but we did it in a time when there were still only three networks.