We also have a piece about the Mayflower, but it's just a very different, very gritty, very character-driven version of why those people were on that boat and what the experience was like for them, emotionally, physically and spiritually, and also the Native Americans and what the state of Native American society was at that time.

The amount of competition is just literally insane.

That's the definition of a mini-series. A mini-series is a show that has no continuing story or narrative elements between one group of episodes and another, so no, I wasn't surprised.

Reality television was in some ways being unimaginative at that time. We were excited about the possibilities of the form, to use real people as your stars, to not be about winning, to be about going on complicated, challenging, funny, dramatic journeys.

For me, personally, I'm more comfortable with what I would call third-person entertainment, meaning watching a character that's explicitly not me and experiencing something through a character's eyes, than what I would call first-person entertainment, which is a video game in which I am the character.

I read every draft of every episode of every series produced at FX.

There are no characters in the limited series Fargo that are derived from the characters in the film Fargo. It's hard to describe how remarkably true to the film the show is.