The threat to free television. The reason television is free is because it is a life support system for commercials. That fundamental aspect is about to change.

The heart and soul of network programming is series programming, the weekly repetition of characters you like having in your house.

I get bored with establishing shots of people getting out of cars and walking into buildings, getting into elevators and then 45 seconds later they have a line.

The story drove the book. That had a very seminal effect on the way I saw writing and storytelling. If you can set a character in a story that is compelling and has a backbone, you draw people in.

People do have viewing patterns, and you disrupt those at your own peril. That's something that everybody learned after 1988. The numbers have gone down every year since that strike. Big time.

The environment doesn't change that radically. You are still going to go home at night and NBC is going to be there, ABC and CBS will still be there.

It was like in Samoa when they'd put up a movie screen on the beach and show movies and the locals would run behind the sheet to see where the people went. It was pretty grim.