Episode Planning Quotes

As the director, it's just a constant stream of meetings where you meet with all of the creatives who make all of the decisions for every part of the episodes. You're also scouting for locations, deciding on the locations, meeting with your first associate director; mine was Jennifer Truelove. She's one of my favorite people on the planet.

Well, I must tell you I write the scripts very close to the bone. So I'm writing episode seven now and couldn't tell you what happens in episode eight.

We got kind of into a rhythm at 'Parks' because there were so many characters that we had an A story, a B story, and a C story just about every episode. So by the middle of that show's run, we always had three stories, and it worked really well.

It's hard to fit everything in and still have episodic television.

Most TV shows are writing the next episode while you're directing the one you're doing, and they're trying to figure out what they're going to do, and they're putting it all together.

In the writers' room, when we talk about each episode, we first talk about the character journey of the episode.

The best thing as a director is being able to be part of the thing that's so cool about a TV show, like running a character arc over six episodes or multiple series.

My grandfather used to say 'Eat the biggest crabs first, that way you're always eating the biggest crabs.' In making a TV show, that means if you have a big funny or smart idea for an episode or a scene or a joke, go for it. Don't save it for another season or another episode, because you may not have the right time again. It's good advice for television, but truly stellar advice for eating crabs.

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.

I think there's going to be many special episodes of 'Blackish.'

The best-case scenario is everything goes perfect and smooth, but we're also a new and weird show. So all my conversations were, "Hey last night didn't go perfect but we kind of know what we've got in store for everybody episode-wise."

No director directs 'Game of Thrones' without reading all the episodes and knowing what's going on. All the episodes are written in advance, so you can do that, which is an important point.

After we map out all the main characters' individual arcs, using color-coded index cards, we arrange them by episode and get a rough idea of the scene order.

With 'Darkly Dreaming Dexter,' we as a group of writers had to take a rather thin novel and spread it out over the course of 12 episodes, and not only 12 episodes, but lay in story for everyone that's going to take you through five years.