Nestor Carbonell Quotes

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.

Once you buy into a television show, there doesn't have to be resolution from week to week. You can develop characters and storylines and react to the audience, so you get more of a serialized version of storytelling where you can go much deeper into each character. It's more like a novel.

It's fun, with 'Bloodline,' because people who come up and recognize me for that really want to know what's happening. The people who have binge-watched it are very obsessed with the characters, which I love.

If you're on a TV show, you never know what's going to happen week to week with your character.

I think anything with a serialized storyline is a perfect match for binge-watching.

TV now, you have to plan it: you structure it for binge watching, meaning you structure the whole season like a three-act play. You have a first act - the first third of the season - second act is the middle third, and you structure it like that.

Everything's always about page-turning, right? What's next? So, if you create questions for audiences, then they'll want to know the answer. Or they begin to formulate possible outcomes. That's the game we play when we're hearing a story unfold. That's part of what sucks us into a movie.

If you don't spend the time you need on developing characters and finding stories, complicated stories, the audience gets tired because they think they're seeing the same thing again and again.

I love bingeing. 'The Wire' was my first binge, and the thing about bingeing is, when you are doing four or five hours a day for a number of days, it becomes a literary experience, closer to reading.

TV is designed to keep characters in place for years on end. The best example is 'M*A*S*H:' You have a three-year police action in Korea, and they stretched that out to eleven seasons. It was a great show, but when you think about it, a weird unreality overtakes a television series. You see the actors age, and yet the characters don't.

I have no idea what the economics of the movie business is, especially with all the new Amazon, Netflix, Showtime, AMC, SyFy, and HBO series. But I am intrigued with what feels like a new type of show - the six-to-eight-hour movie. It's a little too long to watch in one setting, but you can watch it over a three- to five-day period.

I love serial drama.

It's a challenge every year with a TV series. You want to keep evolving and keep it going. That's part of the fun.

We have a 25-year head start for the stories of 'Scorpion.' By the time we get to Season Two and Three, the stuff that happened because of Season One will actually fuel Season Three. So it'll become a self-sustainable show.

Serial fiction is a conceit of comic books and soap operas. As one goes, so goes the other in terms of public consciousness.

I can't imagine soaps will ever stop, because people will always watch as long as they have great stories and characters. But the soaps will have to keep evolving, won't they?

I watch box sets. I worked my way through 'Breaking Bad' and 'Prison Break.'

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 interesting thing about a lot of serialized television is that it's a blessing and curse.

In TV the main purpose is to have them keep their hands off the dial. In movies, where you have a captive audience, the opening is intrinsic to the film.

You have to think about storytelling over the long haul: what is going to engage an audience for, potentially, years and how characters can become deeply involving for an audience.

Sometimes if you tell me what a story is about in just a few sentences, I can tell you if it's going to be a success.

With all of our big-hit shows - like 'Big Bang Theory,' and even 'How I Met Your Mother' - when they first started, you have multiple characters to service, and you want to make sure that the audience has a chance to get the concept, get the emotional arc, and really engage with the relationships.

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

As an author, you think you know where the good parts and the bad parts are. And then you read to a group of children, and you learn when you're boring them, and you hurry through those sections to get to the parts where they're interested again. You start to get a sense of your story's rhythm and flow.