Episodic Content Quotes

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.

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

Working on 'Dexter' is like shooting one big movie every year.

I'm such a huge fan of television and what's happening in television, right now. You are able to visit characters and visit a story, week to week, push things in a different way than you can in a film, and you are able to go deeper, simply because you have more time. I'm just excited to do that. It's always good to do new things.

If you think about TV series, we make 16 one-hour movies a season. You don't get any opportunity like that in movies. I mean, I can't say I'll be able to do 16 movies in the next year, and so that's how I see it.

With TV, you just have to finish the days and get the episodes out. And it's always going to be an impossible schedule. That's the funny thing with TV that not a lot of people realize.

I relish the eight-hour format of a single season because it gives you time to do that.

I think television is really incredible because of the fact that you get to sit with a character for so, and the character does something different, every week. I think that's really interesting.

To me, to spend all the time and energy and face all those creative challenges that you would spend for a two hour movie, you're inventing a world, you're inventing characters. If they're interesting enough, they should be compelling enough to go for five more episodes. How incredibly frustrating would it be to just do one movie?

I've always felt that I wanted to make a Marvel film... I just want to make sure I'm not making an episode.

Yes, we're trying some new stuff. Some of it might work. Some of it might not. This, of course, is the nature of episodic television. They can't all be gems.

I'll always love movies. But there's something I love very much about TV, when you shoot episodes while other episodes are still being written.

I'm going to start work on developing a series for HBO, because I'm naturally given to episodic stories of considerable length. And I won't have to listen to complaints about how wordy and long my work is if you can watch it on your telephone on the subway: You can make it conform to your day as if it were a book.

It's hard to make a book episodic.

I was, in my day, one of the best directors of episodic TV around.

Shooting a new story out of order every week is a fundamentally different beast than stage work, where you tell the same story every night from beginning to end.

I don't keep an ongoing dribble of updates of my day, but I tell little compartmentalized stories every day on Snapchat. I use it much more like making a movie than maintaining a diary. When people watch my 60-second clips, there's a beginning, middle, and end.

The way that people are watching TV is changing. The landscape of television is changing. Movies are becoming much more insular. They're like a walled garden, where you know what you're going to see and you expect it. But in the world of TV, because it's episodic, you can explore any area because you have time to do that. You can take risks on the kinds of storytelling that you're doing.