I think what people watch television for is the emotional continuity, from episode to episode, and feeling that the experience that they had, four episodes ago, has actually been building to an episode that comes later, and knowing that the characters are growing, as a result of that, and making mistakes, is really, really important to the way people connect to television.

In fact, we actually listen to fans all the time. It's helpful because you want to get a sense of what people are looking for and what they disagree with.

You always go by your gut. That's the best you can do. You go by what you feel, and you say yes or no based on what it inspires in you.

I think our goal and intention is to make sure that, when you watch each episode, you don't have to make that choice, but also that you can have stand-alone episodes, where a story can have a beginning, middle and end.

I love the opportunity to tell the story about the characters through the music.

As a director you have to be at 30,000 ft objectively looking at everything, wondering if you're making the right objective, emotional, story, character choices. As the writer, while you're asking all of those same questions, you're also forced by the nature of what writing is to be looking at everything under a microscope. That's the difference between the two jobs.

You used to have to make a choice. Is it a serialized television show, or is it a stand-alone or procedural? We were wildly influenced by The X-Files. Even when we created Fringe, it was the same thing. It's the gold standard of all gold standards, in genre television, and it was so wonderful because you felt so much for those characters.