Show Development Quotes

If I focus solely on developing new material, then I can get a new 45 minute to an hour in about six months. Then I'll work on it and work on it and can make it killer within another six months or so.

What's the difference in opening from scratch in Philly or opening from scratch in New York? The old out-of-town tryout circuit - taking the show pre-Broadway to cities like Boston, New Haven, Philadelphia, Washington - has sort of been replaced with the amount of workshops we do.

I learned how to write TV by writing 'Grey's Anatomy.'

It's actually much harder to develop a TV show than I had anticipated.

With 'Words, Words, Words,' that show was me experimenting with something, and then there was a clear direction for me.

Making a television show is not like making Coca-Cola or Bacardi rum. The human element in our business prevents us from finding a successful formula every time.

Television is such an evolving medium. When you're doing a TV show, it's not like you just shoot for six weeks and you're in an editing room with all of your footage. It's like a guitar or a car, you have to fine tune things. You stop doing what's not working, you work on what is working and you add things that do work.

One of the main pitfalls of any theoretically 'niche' show is that you spend too much time on the 'niche' and not enough time on the 'show.'

We have researchers involved with the show [Spartacus] and they pointed me in a pretty great direction, in terms of what to read, and what to look at or look for, and they also provided me with some material.

Television and movies just take so long. If you pitch a show or develop a project, it can be a year before your show even gets on the air, if it gets picked up.

When we first sat down and talked about how much of the show we were going to do based on the movie, there are certainly things you can see right away, but we wanted to make sure that the audience who maybe never saw the movie or has maybe never seen any of the Marvel characters before - and I know there's three of them left on the planet - could have someone that could be their eyes and take them in.

I think network television is really hard because it has to sail right away. HBO's so much more nurturing, patient. They think it takes a while for a show to kind of congeal and figure out what its strong spots are.

I have a couple screenplays that are done, and I'm looking for the right people to help me make them. I do a lot of television writing to develop new ideas for shows.

Lip Service' was initially a segment. It was so popular that Sirius wanted to make it its own show.

One of the things I'm real proud of is I just made a deal with 20th Century Fox, and I've got my own production company now. I'm developing some television and movies for other people because I have a lot of fresh new ideas. To write is what I love the most.

Working as a showrunner has made it tougher to watch other shows and movies.

Every so often, it's time to make a change with a showrunner. You evaluate the creative and how the show is run and how the writing staff works, and sometimes you want to freshen the show. We just decided that it was time to do that on Community, and no disrespect to anyone.

Putting any show on television is a challenge. I've been very lucky to work with incredible showrunners on 'Smallville' and 'Lost' and 'Heroes.' I hope to bring a lot of those lessons to Marvel live television.

Making a show is also economics. Because the irony is, or the shame of it is, you cannot create a show instantaneously. It needs to be massaged. You need to see who is relating to who. How is it working with the audience? You need to give it a chance for the audience to find it, because there are so many outlets. And the audience doesn't know where to go.

I've read many great samples, both of existing shows I liked and original pilots, and definitely hired the writers - or, at least, tried to!

Once you figure out what your own thing is it's all about trying to develop shows, programs that can, I guess, enhance what you already have and what you can add to Hollywood.

There was so long from when we did the pilot and then when the show was eventually picked up by Comedy Central - and, in fact, we had to shoot the pilot twice.

Now we live in this DVD, iTunes, Hulu age, and show creators and networks are realizing that and letting shows develop on those terms rather than 'We gotta just punch it week to week, man.' Now they're like, 'What will happen if someone watches the entire show?'

Comedy Central wanted to do a show with me, I had a couple failures under my belt with them already, but they still wanted to try something else. They came to me and said they wanted to do something that was internet focused and created original content on their site, so they could compete with the funny or dies and what not. So that was the premise, and they gave us a small amount of money, $5000, and from there it turned into the show.

I came to NBC on 'Friday Night Lights' and they have supported that show and found ways - unprecedented ways - to keep it on the air for a long time. And when I came to them with the idea of doing 'Parenthood,' they not only supported me in doing it but also got behind it in such a way that we were able to put together this incredible cast.