Episodic Storytelling Quotes

You feel quite strangely secure [doing any kind of series]. It's the opposite of how you're supposed to feel doing a movie.

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.

I absolutely love television. What's so great about TV is that I can tell 20 stories in a year. If I was working at a feature studio, I'd tell 1% of someone else's story, over the course of four years.

There's something inherently more appealing about the idea that you could reveal and tell stories about characters over the course of a TV season - 13 or 26 episodes, whatever it might be - than in the course of one two-hour movie. You can do so many more novelistic kinds of things on a TV show - with time, with gradual development of relationships, and so on - than you could possibly do in a movie. And that is very appealing.

That's the definition of a mini-series. A mini-series is a show that has no continuing story or narrative elements between one group of episodes and another, so no, I wasn't surprised.

The joy of a road movie is its very simple narrative nature, which is that you know you're going to go through different places and you're going to meet new people. At the same time, you have to not make it feel too obvious and too crudely episodic.

I loved working on that show [Defiance]. I mean, that show was brutal. We worked long, brutal hours in really brutal weather.

My show is sort of a short-film anthology, and I'm able to tell little stories that don't necessarily carry a whole episode in terms of narrative. I like the audience not being sure what they're getting. I think it's more fun to watch something when you're discovering it as you go along.

The only kind of film I want to write is a story where I can keep on seeing the stories play out. I'm a huge television fan, and I'm a huge continuing storyline fan.

Most fiction series are written so that the reader can come in at any point and not feel lost, but if you can start at the beginning, why not?

Crime is one of the leads of the show. If there's ever anything that deals with a character's personal life, you don't have to worry about it getting too crazy. People don't have to worry about character arcs. Each episode is a self-contained unit.

I think that we're moving into this new phase of television where audiences are really embracing stories with a beginning, middle, and end.

One of the tricks that you have to learn, with episodic TV, is you don't know how many years you're going to be blessed with.

I've always loved working on series. The crew feels like a family and it's nice to have a regular gig that you can count on.

What's so great about TV is that you can get an opportunity to tell really rich stories, over the course of so many hours. It's like a novel of this type of medium.

The difference between directing film and directing television is so stark simply because TV is a living breathing organism already when you direct an episode.

With '44 Scotland Street' I found myself having to work out how a daily novel works, and it is completely different to a conventional novel.

Epic stories, especially 'quest narratives' like 'The Iliad' and 'The Odyssey,' are brilliant structures for storytelling. The quest lends itself to episodic storytelling.

Sex can no longer be the germ, the seed of fiction. Sex is an episode, most properly conveyed in an episodic manner, quickly, often ironically. It is a bursting forth of only one of the cells in the body of the omnipotent I, the one who hopes by concentration of tone and voice to utter the sound of reality.

When you think of things like The Sopranos, The Wire, Damages, they are beating film on a regular basis. Most films are terrible. It's only the 2% that are good. There's things you can do on TV which you can't do on film. There is something about those episodic, serialisations that are grand and operatic.

With every episodic, there's a learning curve where writers try to find the voice of the characters by way of the actors. Many details are found along the way. On 'Caprica,' although the franchise already existed, we were creating an entirely new world full of new characters.