Episode Quality Quotes

One of the things I noticed about the '2 Broke Girls' pilot was that it looked like a new episode in a season and not a pilot, and that's an amazing sign.

That first episode of 'Newsroom,' the way it just cooked, I thought it was really good.

I can't say that the ending of a story is always the best part of the story, and yet there's sort of this implicit idea that the finale is somehow supposed to be the mind-blowing best episode of a show. The question is: Why is that? Why do people make that assumption?

Arrested Development never felt safe. Even the first season, we did thirteen episodes, and we thought we'd never do a back nine. So I never thought in a million years we'd get to make three seasons. I was happy we got that far. I thought it was really good, and I'm really proud of it. I don't think we made a bad episode.

I always thought it would be funny to have the Parents Television Council write an episode of 'Family Guy' and give them full creative control. Then see how good the episode is. That's something we've actually discussed in the writers' room. We haven't proposed it yet, but if somebody from the PTC reads this, it might be worth discussing.

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.

One of the tricky things about running a TV show is that you just never know how good the guest stars you cast on a weekly basis, how good they're going to be in the episode. Sometimes they surprise you in good ways and sometimes they surprise you in disappointing ways.

When we were doing 'The West Wing,' the hardest thing about doing 'The West Wing' was being compared to yourself. You go out there and want every episode to be as good as your best episode. I wrote 88 episodes of 'The West Wing,' and when you do that, one of them is going to be your 88th best, so your 88th best better be pretty good.

I think when you do a season of television you go into it going I'd like the season premiere needs to be amazing. The season finale needs to be amazing.

The standard that '24' is held to is higher than at other shows. A weaker episode of '24' would be an amazing episode for a lot of other shows.

Like any show, I think some episodes are going to be stronger than others, but I think it's a good show that people enjoy and I hear the reactions too.

Every episode of 'Suits' is great and moves the story forward.

The second episode of any new show can be tough. You have about a week to top the well-crafted and polished pilot episode that was written over six months.

I think audiences can feel when they're being served a filler episode.