TV Storytelling Quotes

TV is a completely different discipline, which I think I am still learning about. You just have to learn how to work fast and pace yourself.

The writing is so great on TV now; it's such a pleasure to watch.

In film and theater, you know the story and the journey from beginning to end, but with TV, you can keep peeling away layers and exploring a new world each week.

TV has a three storyline structure, but 'The Killing' takes on that structure with such ambition.

I look at the feature films that come out, and by and large, 85 percent of them are things I wouldn't in a million years sit down and watch. The more interesting storytelling is happening on television by a long shot.

TV is a different animal these days. You can bring together really smart writing and directing, in-depth character development and really meaty political and emotional stories.

I've always said that 'Twin Peaks,' to me, was like a novel we filmed every page of.

'Psych' was so many different things, and they evolved in so many different ways over the years, and towards the end there, we were barely solving mysteries anymore. We were just paying homage to our favorite movies, television shows, and bringing through as many '80s icons as we possibly could.

I watch 'Watchmen', and I wish I was in that writers room, so I could figure out what they're doing, story-breaking-wise. I've never seen a television show like that.

During seventy years of TV, the audience came to feel that the rules are, you can't kill the second lead on your TV show! Whatever's going to happen, it's all okay because there's no way they can kill the star.

TV is a big business. In some ways, it's surpassed films, in terms of the way people invest in these shows and invest in these characters, and give up so much of their time to follow these people's stories.

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.

I think that there's a sense that procedurals, because they have more of a formula to the storytelling, it doesn't necessarily rate as high as some of the high-concept, big-idea, big-swing things that get the critics really excited.

In writing on the page, you can be a bit elliptical, but on TV, you can't dance around stuff. You either show it, or you don't.

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

With a film, you just don't have time to build sympathy for the character. But I think we're moving away from that in TV. With TV, you have a little more leeway to allow them to rise and fall and rise again and be much more complicated beings.

You never know, especially on episodic television, you just don't know week to week what's going to happen.

I wrote Steve Carell's last episode. I think it was a really good episode, but there's always a tension between what's good for the series and what's good for an episode, because the more closure you put on an episode, the more significant feeling it is.

I don't mean to insult television, but a lot of the time, it's pretty straightforward. If you say, 'I love you,' you mean 'I love you.' There isn't time for anything more.

There's something inherently more appealing about the idea that you could reveal and tell stories about characters over the course of a TV season - 13 or 26 episodes, whatever it might be - than in the course of one two-hour movie. You can do so many more novelistic kinds of things on a TV show - with time, with gradual development of relationships, and so on - than you could possibly do in a movie. And that is very appealing.

I think 'Lost' didn't invent the flashback, obviously. It's been a cinematic tool. It's been around almost as long as cinema has.

I've always been a super-fan of television storytelling. It took me a while to figure that out in a career capacity, but certainly in a life capacity, I've been an avid viewer of television for decades.

One of the things that set us apart early on, as opposed to other animated shows, was the fact that 'Bojack' was continuous and serialized.

What was important for 'Legacies' to actually be a successful show is that we had to introduce new mythology.

You look at shows on cable, and there's a lot of smart writing out there.