Jonathan Frakes Quotes

Doing one movie every two years is about all I can handle 'cause, being the creator at '30 Rock', my year there starts in the middle of June and goes back around until March.

TV is designed a certain way where you have three, four days on stage and three or four days out. You're basically making a feature every seven days. You have to shoot an hour's worth.

In a movie, you work three months to tell a story that happens in two hours. In a Mexican soap opera, you work one day to make a story that's an hour and a half. So you can see the difference in the quality of the project.

I've been lucky enough that in the U.K., I've done shows that have aired once a week. I make a show there that runs seasonally, and we make one episode a week, and that is great - the value of time. You can really think and finesse what you want to do.

It's a lot of hard work to do a weekly TV show. It's certainly not fun.

TV is a hard thing to do. It's a hard thing to get a show.

The schedule of doing a live TV show every week is very difficult.

I liked working in a series, going to work every day and not having to leave town for long locations. I was producing them and building an audience.

At our best, it's a good experience but we do 22 episodes a year, so there are some clunkers.

You do show after show after show and get them done and on the air. Television devours material. We work a minimum of 12, 14 hours, and often 15, 18 hours a day.

A TV show is constant work, which is the great thing about it.

In TV we've used something that I love... it's called process. I love process.

Formulating the proposal is about 80% of the actual time of the process. In the end, the time spent filming, editing and postproduction is a very small proportion of the total time you spend in the production of the film.

I spend 80% of my time in my restaurants. Taping my TV shows doesn't take much time, and then they get aired a lot. That's the thing people don't realize.

When you're making TV, the last thing you want to do is watch TV. It's too much.

The only real difference between shooting 'Firefly' and 'Serenity' was that on 'Serenity,' we had a lot more freedom with time. When you're shooting a television show, you usually have anywhere between six and nine pages of script to shoot a day, and only twelve hours to do it. But with 'Serenity,' we could shoot one scene all day long.

It's actually much harder to develop a TV show than I had anticipated.

Part of making TV is the process - you just have to churn it out.

With TV, your first draft just doesn't matter. It's a skeleton, and then there's draft after draft after draft, and so many other factors influence it. It's just a whole different kind of storytelling.

TV is really about keeping things fresh and making sure you have the most energy possible for these very short spurts of time.

I'm interested in producing more TV shows.

I essentially have always directed everything on my TV show without using that title; I edited and wrote all my stuff.

Televison is time bound. Whereas a movie has time. You can't write a script for television and keep it for one year.

That's what my job is: to create quality programming.

Usually, on a show like 'Game of Thrones,' you don't have much time to rehearse; a lot of the sets are not available.