Serialized Format Quotes

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.

That's what's so great about television. You're able to tell this long story, where you couldn't really do that in a film because you have to tell a story in an hour and a half or two hours.

For me, as an audience member, I'm always most engaged by serialized storytelling, so as an actor, the thing that I take away from it is how much fun it is to perform a serialized story.

TV has a three storyline structure, but 'The Killing' takes on that structure with such ambition.

Cable series have more time to focus on characters, and a structure that allows for a development in character as you go along. Network shows have a pressure of time and space that is completely different.

On any serialized show, you're going to have through-lines that take you through the season, and you're going to have individual arcs that resolve themselves in shorter order.

I really like scripted dramas. My favorite show of all time would have to be 'Lost': I loved how the writers and producers were able to weave the different storylines together; and the acting in that show was incredible.

Television has a different biorhythm than movies. I love the biorhythm of TV.

It's fun to grow with a character over the course of a TV series. Video games are usually a much more condensed process.

Babylon 5 is probably the biggest, most ambitious television science fiction series ever made. It's one big novel told over five years with 110 different stories told within it.

I think that the difference between 'The Sopranos' and the shows that came before it was that it was really personal. There had been a lot of dramas, a lot of really good ones, a lot of really bad ones, but they were always franchise shows about cops, or doctors, or lawyers. They weren't about the writer himself.

I think the tricky balance, the most important thing more than the horror is to have a compelling story, compelling drama, a show about great characters that you care about and you want to come back every week to see what they're up to.

I love series television because it's so much fun to have that much opportunity to paint the character.

Even though shows like NYPD Blue are soaps in my opinion, but they're individualized to an extent that you can still follow what's going on if you miss a week.

The idea was always going to be that each year is a stand-alone story, which did make it easier on some level. It also requires the network to have the creative imagination to say, 'This is also 'Fargo,'' you know what I mean?

I love doing television; it's such a brilliant way to tell a story over six hours rather over the two hours of doing a movie.

I kind of love that British style: two seasons of tight, compact, good television. The more episodes you have, the thinner the episodes get.

Indian audiences these days aren't really interested in watching a character on screen evolve. They don't want to see a young girl evolve into being a partner and enter motherhood - they are only really concerned about the story. As long as the story is getting interesting with every passing episode, they want more.

I used to watch 'EastEnders' till the plots got ridiculous.

That's why I love doing television because it's something that fans and viewers can sit down each week and get to know your character and get to know the show and get to know what's going on and fall in love with you all over again, like they did in previous shows.

It's not that I don't enjoy a good mystery that comes and goes in a hour. I do, but God, 'Breaking Bad' and 'Saul' unfold like novels.

In the long run, I think I like 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' better as a television series, because it had so much more time and room and space to grow.

You never know, especially on episodic television, you just don't know week to week what's going to happen.

My only hesitation after 'Law & Order' was that I didn't want to be in a super dry procedural like that. I found that satisfying, but very tough because every episode was kind of the same. It just is with that show.

We're trying to tell a very full story of 'Nashville' and these characters in Nashville, and I'm really hopeful that we're going to be able to do something as innovative as 'American Horror Story' and 'Friday Night Lights.' And I think so far, we're on the right path for that.