You know, we certainly have a great budget on the show, but the expansions to world of the show really arise because, and this is kind of the idea of the premise of the show, where is each week you're kind of meeting . . . It's random access.

For me, the attraction of TV is that you continue to get to tell those stories and refine those characters. The other thing is that TV, in the last years, got really, really, really good.

One of the things with our show is posing a lot of questions, but getting a lot of answers too.

Time eventually convinces most of us that forgiveness is a virtue. Conveniently, cowardice and forgiveness look identical at a certain distance.

I don't think you can guess what people will really like. You have to come at it from a more natural place and then kind of hope that your taste is shared by enough people to keep going.

Typically with HBO shows, the ninth episode often winds up being a big one and when lots of exciting stuff happens. And then the tenth one is the more placid, character-based one.

TV is, as I'm discovering now, a marathon. You have to keep going and going and going.