I had worked in TV prior to working on 'Game of Thrones' - 'Game of Thrones' is far more cinematic than any other television show that I had done before, and so I feel that the worlds of TV and film are most definitely merging as one.
When I started, TV was regarded as something that wasn't as great as film or theatre or radio, but it has proved to have far greater powers than those.
When we started with 'Big Brother' and created the reality genre, no one could ever foresee that there was so much space in the genre that it could deliver so many formats. There will be periods where there is not enough new stuff to keep the genre alive. But it will never die.
Over the years, TV has gotten so much better, especially with the advent of cable. The bar has been raised. I think HBO really set the standard with 'The Sopranos,' and then on mainstream TV, shows like 'Lost' broke amazing ground.
When I started as a filmmaker, I never, ever imagined in a million years that I would be doing television because, at that time, TV was a very different medium.
Old-school viewers remain adamant that 'The Real World' has deteriorated, as if the original enterprise were some pristine experiment that got sullied as the conditions in the lab got sloppier.
Television used to be made much more in a vacuum; the only feedback the audience had for a long time was in a Nielsen number that would arrive sometime after the show had been broadcast. And now, people are just completely engaged on so many levels, and I think that you have to find a way as a show creator to follow your own compass.
Netflix and Hulu are just extensions of television that live on the Web.
English television from the Fifties to the Nineties was the least bad in the world, and now it's just as bad as it is anywhere.
Our future is only limited by our commitment to keep the momentum going. Now that television has been set free from all constraints - including time, place, and all previous definitions - what comes next?
The whole cable-TV original programming just changed the nature of television.
I rode into the dawning world of television in 1944 on a train.
When I was a kid there were a very select few channels - programmes had to have more of a large appeal and they just didn't offer very much. Now you have a situation where the television world has expanded and there's hundreds of channels.
I can't imagine seeing Batman in black and white. It was such a colourful TV series. I know. I'm ancient. It wasn't abnormal to be without a television in those days. People who had colour were special.
Ratings have changed, viewer habits have changed and the options for the audience have grown enormously, but I don't think how you tell a story is fundamentally different.
It's not like television is now for women who have been put out to pasture. Television is for everybody.
We're in a time now where technology is such that we can create anything, and that's what's new about television and film these days.
I think people are going to places that they weren't able to with television before, and I think Netflix really paved the way for that. With freedom comes better content, and with better content comes great actors and a bigger audience. I think that has just snowballed into a movement for making really great TV.
I'm very, very proud to have been at what I feel are two of the pivotal moments in this whole new Golden Era of television - one being 'The Sopranos' with HBO and now with Netflix expanding that whole HBO concept to the world and making it more of a global thing. It's been wonderful to witness that from those two vantage points.
The internet has surrounded television and turned television into an art form.
Most of my career up until the last couple of years has basically been a training ground for me. Actors that came up in the '50s and '60s, they had the theater, and television was in its infancy.
You push a button and it goes all over the world and on Sunday people are saying, 'Oh, I binge watched all 10 of them. Where's more?' and you go oh, the world has changed. It's not my dad walking to the television set and turning a knob to Ed Sullivan.
If there's something decent going in television, the mediums now are kind of equal. Television has become much higher quality.
I remember thinking all TV was black and white, but that was because we had a really old, broken TV. And then I went to a friend's house and I was like, woah, your TV is like, crazy! Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. That was my first show.
There used to be a huge snobbism between the film industry and the television industry. I produced and acted in my first - well way back - but the first thing that I produced and acted in was Sarah, Plan and Tall. And the only place to go at the time for really quality television was Hallmark Hall of Fame. And think how much television has changed since then.
