I think the semantics of mini-series for a network is that it has an end.
I was a big fan of 'Awake' and also 'Lone Star.'
As a kid, I always loved serialized books. It's the reason why people love 'Harry Potter.' Serialization is amazing. It works in television. It works in film and it works in books. Especially when you're a young kid, you get attached to these characters.
It's interesting that so many books now are published as the first in a series. It never occurred to me. Although 'The Giver' does have an ambiguous ending. I've heard about that from readers over the years.
I love 'Game of Thrones' and 'Breaking Bad.'
It's tricky to do a serialized show and not lose viewers along the way because you really have to watch every episode.
For me, as an audience member, I'm always most engaged by serialized storytelling, so as an actor, the thing that I take away from it is how much fun it is to perform a serialized story.
Maybe they'll start making serialized movies. I watched the first couple seasons of '24' and it's really fun. I bought the DVD and watched it over a month or so and it's great. It's like reading a novel. It has a lot of possibilities that are more difficult to accomplish with a film.
Over the years, TV has gotten so much better, especially with the advent of cable. The bar has been raised. I think HBO really set the standard with 'The Sopranos,' and then on mainstream TV, shows like 'Lost' broke amazing ground.
But in a TV series, you can really take a novelistic approach and explore characters that you wouldn't ordinarily see, in a level of complexity that you wouldn't ordinarily get to explore just out of the sheer time constraints in a feature.
TV, particularly network television, gives you a much greater opportunity to tell a long-form story, to develop a character and keep it detailed. Film, by its nature, is more finite.
I usually tell people I watch like '24' and 'Prison Break.'
When 'Line of Duty' started on BBC2, there was a feeling that it couldn't ever become a big show because the BBC2 drama budget is much smaller, and a returning cop series would take away from the Stephen Poliakoff/David Hare stuff that they love to commission.
You feel quite strangely secure [doing any kind of series]. It's the opposite of how you're supposed to feel doing a movie.
We pitched 'Sightseers' as a TV idea originally, and it was rejected because it was too dark. But then things like 'Dexter' came out, 'Breaking Bad'... There are so many sophisticated dramas now with comic elements to them.
The first comic I can remember ever reading was a 'Fantastic Four' issue that my dad bought out of the drugstore once. The thing that struck me about it was that the ending wasn't an ending. It was essentially a cliffhanger. It was the first time I had ever read anything like that, where you read a book, but the book isn't the book.
One of the things I've been most excited by is U.S. television drama. For my money, it's some of the greatest narrative art of our time. Each series is like a 19th-century Russian novel: you need to do a lot of work in the first few episodes, just as you do in the first 50-60 pages of those books.
A great thing is happening on cable TV. You see characters change in stories over years, like in Tolstoy. That's a whole, thrilling new form that I really enjoy. They are Tolstoy-an in their endless character development and narrative changes... a show like 'Breaking Bad' is astonishing.
I didn't watch much TV as a kid and I don' t watch it now. I don' t find anything beautiful or unique to the medium, and the only thing you can do on TV that you can't do in film is make a continuing story - which is so cool!
'Lost' is an entity of its own. It's still such a culture touchstone that I think it'll be something people go back to for a long time, like 'Star Trek.' I'm just so amazed by the show's popularity.
I don't really watch shows as a regular routine any more, but I loved 'Happy Valley'. Yes it was depressing, but at least I knew it would all be over in six episodes.
Without 'Twin Peaks,' there would have been no 'Northern Exposure,' 'Picket Fences,' 'X-Files' or 'Alias.' It started the movement of 'off-center' television.
Soap opera seems to be a dirty word, but actually they are the most popular shows we have.
Obviously, a lot of TV shows are based on chronological episode viewing, and the stories are contingent upon watching it in order. Syndicated shows, you don't have to watch in order. You're just watching characters that don't change that much.
Even though shows like NYPD Blue are soaps in my opinion, but they're individualized to an extent that you can still follow what's going on if you miss a week.
