Recurring Characters Quotes

There's a good family of actors in 'Portlandia.' It's a small community with people who pop up again and again. The show's a little weird show, and you want to grow with the people who are in it, like Dana who plays the chicken waitress, and Ellen who was the adult babysitter.

There have been so many 'James Bond' movies, 'Spiderman' films, 'Mission Impossible' series, etc. Is there any difference in the basic story? Yet, each time there's a release, people are excited.

After doing 'Firefly' and moving on, I always wanted to be part of a series again. I love doing films, too, but there's just something special about being part of the team and feeling like you're actually a part of the family, and I always look to re-create that.

Networks don't want a show with a continuing story. There's no backend potential.

One of the great things about doing series television is the guest actors that you can have come on and play around with.

If the book is finished—published and on the shelf—I do not think of revising it. But if I'm not finished psychologically with characters, they will recur, either as themselves or as new, slightly altered manifestations, and their same issues will reappear. It's a matter of the subject and emotional investment and my own obsessive thinking about various issues It's an unconscious process. To say that a single story is not done isn't quite true. A story can be finished and judged successful or not by somebody else, but if the issue is not done for me, I can count on its reappearance.

Dan Curtis, our producer, has the idea that people like to see a stock company of actors.

It is fun to do the one-off guest stars on stuff.

A show like Knots or any other show that can be called a soap opera does terribly in syndication because if you're a viewer and you miss a week you don't know what's going on.

Most sitcoms and cartoons, especially, you can rely on, because they go back to square one at the beginning of every episode.

The fictional world seems larger, seems to have more dimension and richness when, for example, the protagonist from one novel you've read has a cameo role in another. I think that recognition is a very, very powerful phenomenon; it is one of the deepest and greatest pleasures of reading.

The great thing about TV is that it's so fluid. When you bring in someone for one quick role and they're fantastic, you can bring them back.

There were offers to do 'Tum Bin 2' and 'Tum Bin 3' but then it would have been the same kind of franchise films which I think limit an actor.

Writers tend to hate recurring characters; there's this writer snob thing about it. But I don't have that. I feel like the challenge is always to find a cool and innovative way to do it and, obviously, to not repeat your jokes.