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

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 agendas on the management side of the table now are not in sync like they used to be because you have vastly different entities supplying programming to networks.

The most positive step is to try to expand the employment base by making it, if not economically friendly, at least not economically disastrous, for studios to take on deficits.

Everybody knows things are not the same. The people running the TV end of a major vertically integrated company know how much money a successful show can make.

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.'