I like to find ideas where the research is going to be fun.

I've always said at the beginning of every single season of the show when I was running the show in the writers' room, "This is the last season, so let's smoke 'em if we've got 'em."

Television showrunners are a foolishly optimistic bunch.

People pitch me the crazy mystery mind-blowing thing all the time. My response is, 'Great, but how do the characters feel about it, and how do we reveal new facets and new dimensions of who they are?'

At the end of day, people are starving and, if people are starving and thirsty and they need to keep their families alive, people become desperate quickly. There are real world examples of this.

Let's be honest, any show will live or die based on how good the characters are, how good the actors are, how complicated the relationships are, how grounded they are and how much heart they have.

When you do 22 episodes of a network show, it's incredibly useful to have a format that gives you a jumping-off point for a story.