I've never had a series that's gone past 12 episodes.
I have been in the series for over 3 years - 3 series. There will be a fourth series next year which of course I won't be in because I'm now dead. So in total I appeared in 25 episodes.
At our best, it's a good experience but we do 22 episodes a year, so there are some clunkers.
I told you, I have done a lot of projects and as often as I run into someone who recognizes me from something else, I run into someone who is like 'You're on Grey's Anatomy' and I have only been on for seven episodes. It's kind of amazing.
Yeah, I'd done a bunch of pilots. Some that had gone for a while. One that went for 13 episodes. But I had never been on a show that had lasted more than that.
Ten episodes goes by really quickly, especially when you've got a really tough shooting schedule of seven-day episodes.
A lot of American shows don't last for as long as 12 episodes. They get cut after one. But certainly one of the great things about The Office in particular was that there was a beginning, a middle and an end.
I think the rigors of a TV schedule are brutal and 'Six Feet Under' wasn't a network schedule. We did 13 shows, we didn't do 22. I don't know how people do that. I really don't. I mean the shows are shorter, but wow, it's quite a discipline.
It feels as though, with all of these cable series or Internet shows or limited series events that are only 10 or 13 episodes... the quality is really rising.
Being in the industry, I've seen many situations where someone will get the call from the network where they say 'You guys have 5 episodes to wrap it up.' Then all your long-term story arcs gotta get wrapped up in five episodes because that's how many episodes you got left. I would hate to see that happen to 'Castle'.
I kind of love that British style: two seasons of tight, compact, good television. The more episodes you have, the thinner the episodes get.
Cable shows do 13 episodes. I get that. I can wrap my head around 13 episodes. You make them all, you post them all, and then you get to air them. The network cycle is way more intense. There's more episodes.
How that works is our first season was the year we had a threatened writers' strike, so what we did was that instead of doing 22 episodes, we did 30. We put 10 in the bank.
Normally, if you do a television show, it's 25 episodes. Your year is kind of shot, you know what I mean?
We work the full year round to make 10 or 12 episodes, and 'The Good Wife' makes, like, 26 in that time or something, which I can't believe. I don't know how they do it.
There are certain economics involved in making a network TV show that you want to amortize the costs of that, so the more episodes you make, the cheaper they all are individually.
Doing a truncated series is like doing a long movie, which allows for a certain artistic freedom. After just 12 episodes, you can take a breather and do other things for your career.
It used to be that you had to do a certain number of episodes to hit syndication in order to try to keep a show on, because it's important to the network because it sells good commercial time. That's really not how HBO does things.
The last season of 'Rescue Me' is going to be very sort of half and half: it's how you think 'Rescue Me' would end versus something very outside the box. And, they do it in this sort of perfect way - it's only nine episodes, you know. Very stream-lined.
I really wasn't on the Dallas set much. I did three or four episodes so I didn't see too much.
There is evidence that people do want to watch shows back to back - that's why DVR use is so high. When you're able to DVR something, people will watch more than one episode.
There will always be economic pressure to make hits, identify hits, and then exploit hits. And you're going to exploit them with as many episodes as you probably can.
Another show I really enjoyed working on was 'Raising The Bar.' I did four or five episodes of that show.
It's not about creating 22 episodes indefinitely for as long as you can do.
I'll cop to this: so much of doing a 22-episode show is just keeping your head above water.
