Life is painful sometimes. It touches everyone, so you may as well try to look for other answers and find peace. So, it is difficult to write those types of things because nobody wants to tell sad stories. I think that I'll always tell stories about human hope. I would love to be able to tell somebody, "It's okay. It's all right. Be a good person." That's what my job is, in life.

Another part of the challenge was to bring back things that you've forgotten about and maybe some things you haven't forgotten about, recontextualize them and have the series make sense.

A lot of people plan for failure, but they don't plan for success, and that's a big problem, especially in the TV world 'cause you're trying to find out what your show is.

The way that I work is that I try to work in metaphors, and you can't write a metaphor unless you know where you're going, so I always think about the future.

It took me a long time to get to a position where I can feel that, with my art, I'm capable of saying what I need to say, and once I finish it, I can sit back and say, "It's done, and I'm okay with that. People can judge it good or bad, and it doesn't matter. I'm okay with it because I said something I needed to say." That's a really hard place to get, as an artist.

So, I can live with people saying, "I didn't like it." But I can't live with people saying, "There just seems to be no plan here," 'cause there is a plan. And a lot of people fall into that, where they don't know what their show is yet. Their pilot gets picked up, and they have to figure it out. I would hate to be in that situation.

There are a lot of shows that have secrets and string people along and use the secrets of the narrative engine to keep people coming back every week. I don't know if those programs even have an answer. I don't know how they build their shows.