Last summer a second unit production crew went to France and shot scenes for several of this season's episodes. They shot costumed actors in and around real castles and landmarks, we couldn't possibly have duplicated here in Hollywood.
I really love the karate thing I did on CHIPs. I studied with a trainer because I knew we'd do episodes that had karate.
I was really gratified that, of all the episodes of 'Cooked,' the baking one really hit a chord. There were months where there were dozens of loaves posted from people on my Twitter feed every day... And it's a little bit of a guy thing. Most of those loaves put up on Twitter were put up there by guys.
Ten episodes goes by really quickly, especially when you've got a really tough shooting schedule of seven-day episodes.
I know I don't want to do another single-camera show. It's so time-consuming. I did a couple of episodes of 'Whitney' as her mom, but I have been laying low. I love being with my kids and being a mom.
It used to be that you had to do a certain number of episodes to hit syndication in order to try to keep a show on, because it's important to the network because it sells good commercial time. That's really not how HBO does things.
I think it's just a lot more pressure to make the scenes work when you're doing a film, because when you're doing a series you feel like, I have so many scenes, so many episodes, so if I don't get it exactly right this time, I have another scene later. You feel less pressure.
When the show started out, it was like all of a sudden we had to do 35 episodes and we had just a month and a half to write them, and it took me a while to realize that I was in charge.
I would watch the remaining 12 or so episodes of 'Breaking Bad' I haven't seen by noon tomorrow, but my wife would kill me. I watched all five seasons of 'The Wire' in a month, and she was not happy about it.
I feel terrible for directors of TV because all the episodes have to look the same. They make a great series for five or six years, and then when it's canceled, they can't break out on their own.
I was doing Babylon 5 season two and I was in all 22 episodes of that.
Well, I guess most people would only know me from The O.C. I did a few episodes of Gilmore Girls before that. I was also a client on a lot of lawyer shows.
I needed to feed my family. I read a couple of the episodes. How can you keep on doing the same thing?
If I'm racist, don't think I would have directed shows like 'The Parkers' and 'The Wayans Brothers' or worked 41 episodes with Victoria Rowell on 'Diagnosis: Murder.'
You don't have a lot of time; you have to get it right. It's amazing how they create these episodes in such a short amount of time. They lavish a lot of care and money on each episode, and they just look terrific.
If we lived in a time where people couldn't watch 'Lost' on Hulu or record it on their DVR, we wouldn't necessarily have succeeded. We need people to be able to catch up. Now you choose when you watch TV. We wouldn't have survived in the old days because people would have missed episodes.
Well, it was very interesting to play a character and stretch it over such a long time - 12 episodes. I had never done a TV show before, so week to week it was unclear what we would be asked to do.
I flew back and forth and did episodes of Roseanne while I was at Yale.
We made 16 episodes of Cracker and I loved doing the show, but unfortunately no one was watching us.
First episodes are difficult things to write.
I've been on so many primetime shows that were cancelled - after one episode, after 10 episodes, after just one season. I got used to that. But I found myself choking up a bit at 'OLTL.' It was really hard to say goodbye to those people. It was not the way we wanted to go out.
I suffer from manic-depressive disorder, and I've chosen not to take medication for it. Because of that, every once in a while I go through manic episodes and really depressed episodes.
I think one of the coolest things about the job is the level of trust we have for each other. The actors fully trust that the writers will write amazing episodes, and the writers trust that the actors will follow their instincts with the characters.
I think there's going to be many special episodes of 'Blackish.'
I was very comfortable on the set of 'Lost'. I was so nervous when I went on to the set because I had just watched all the 'Lost' episodes. I was, like, a fan. A big fan.
I've often reflected on this in the past weeks as I've been following the presidential campaign: Very often, I thought it would have been great for both of these guys to sit down and be force-fed a couple of dozen episodes of Star Trek.
Tweeting is a great way to practice writing jokes, but there is so much more to comedy writing than just jokes. Jokes are a necessity, but you also have to learn how to write characters, to break a story, to keep coherence between episodes. I've learned more by being a TV writer than I ever could've on my own.
All the weird inconveniences of adult life that you thought they made up to lend excitement and color to episodes of 'Sex and the City' are, in fact, real.
There were episodes where I would wear seven or eight outfits. It took a lot of time to get those together. What the character wears is very essential to how I create the character.
When you film a reality show, it's so jumbled. They shoot episodes in all orders!
Two days later I got a call that they wanted to try out the character for seven episodes. Eleven years and 22 Emmys later, Cliff was still sitting at that bar.
David Boreanaz is actually a very good director and he directed one of our episodes. Excellent director, knew exactly what he wanted. We never had long days with David. He was great, he knew exactly what he wanted and he's a fantastic director.
The problem was to sustain at any cost the feeling you had in the theater that you were watching a real person, yes, but an intense condensation of his experience, not simply a realistic series of episodes.
I used to write in school a lot; I always liked it and used to write on my own, comic books, come up with alternate story lines to the stuff I watched and read, a lot of books and TV, episodes of 'Twilight Zone.' I didn't think about it.
What they told us about 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' when we first started was that we were guaranteed 26 episodes, so that was the longest job I've ever had. And that was basically it - we didn't know what the premise of the show was going to be and we waited, week by week, to see a script.
I'll be directing some more 'Private Practice' episodes when we wrap 'Caprica.'
