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.

Advertising is the art of the tiny. You have to tell a complete a story and deliver a complete message in a very encapsulated form. It disciplines you to cut away extraneous information.

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.

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.

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.

Their argument is that most shows are losers, which is true, but it's also disingenuous to say, 'We are not going to take the risk unless it is totally covered by the few successful shows that are out there.'

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