To a certain degree, with a TV show, people are looking for a certain amount of familiarity. You don't want to pull the rug out, but you also want to keep things fresh and keep changing it up.

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.

Everybody is waiting for the end to come, but what if it already passed us by? What if the final joke of Judgment Day was that it had already come and gone and we were none the wiser? Apocalypse arrives quietly; the chosen are herded off to heaven, and the rest of us, the ones who failed the test, just keep on going, oblivious. Dead already, wandering around long after the gods have stopped keeping score, still optimistic about the future.

I always love it best when you have a project where there is this commingling of the subject matter and the way in which you're recording that subject matter.

We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down, and worry about our place in the dirt.

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.

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