Episodic Structure Quotes

I didn't really watch the show [Star Trek]. I still haven't seen about 150 of them. So I didn't really think of them too much in terms of episodes. I thought of them as kind of one long seven-year episode.

In film and theater, you know the story and the journey from beginning to end, but with TV, you can keep peeling away layers and exploring a new world each week.

One of the problems with episodic television of any color is that everything has got to be okay at the end of the episode so it can start again next week.

If you think about it, episodic filmmaking has not been something that people have really done.

Remember Star Trek? They're on this huge ship and they've got all these people, right? But you only see them, maybe they go on some mission and one of them gets killed.

I think that a movie of a TV show is really tricky, and I don't know if it's ever really been done well. Because it's really hard if you have a 22-minute show, especially something like 'Party Down,' where it's all contained at the party.

'Laila' is very interesting and like Ram Gopal Varma's 'Darna Mana Hai,' it is episodic in nature.

A typical TV show is always about protecting the franchise - it's all about stretching it out as long as you can take it. And it's about taking the characters in any given hour as far as you can take them, but then resetting them more or less back to zero so at the beginning of the next week, so they're still the character you know and love.

A lot of shows start at one place, and then each episode is like a new little circle, often getting smaller.

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.

As an actor, you're always worried about getting stuck on a show that's not good because working actors need the paycheck. So being cast on a regular procedural, where everything gets wrapped up by the end of the episode, was always a fear of mine because that doesn't really test you as an actor.

It's hard to make a book episodic.

One of the great things about a TV series is that it's different to a movie - in a movie you obviously know the beginning, the middle and the end of what you're going to do. With a TV series it's unfolding, and you're discovering with every episode.

The network wants you to make a thing that's just a stand-alone episode, so you never get any character or continuity. This is one of the ways in which television can actually be good, and even better than the movies, because it gives you a chance to tell a long story.

On the other hand [making a string of one-off episodes], there's a real freedom, because you're kind of reinventing the show every week.

Normally, a TV show shoots episodically.

The danger of serialization is that you almost get into a monotone - where they all have the same beat and pace, and it's all one long thing - and when you can kind of do this interesting mixture of episodic and serialization, you can kind of take the audience on a more interesting journey.

We do want the freedom to move scenes from episode to episode to episode. And we do want the freedom to move writing from episode to episode to episode, because as it starts to come in and as you start to look at it as a five-hour movie just like you would in a two-hour movie, move a scene from the first 30 minutes to maybe 50 minutes in. In a streaming series, you would now be in a different episode. It's so complicated, and we're so still using the rules that were built for episodic television that we're really trying to figure it out.