The best shows are always the ones that are very, very low-concept and just about great characters.

My favorite TV show of all time is 'The Wire,' which has the feeling of a project-based show. You draw in people from disparate parts of the world, and they have to work together to achieve a goal.

A million years ago, when doing research about the world of municipal government, one thing that struck me is how often people's job titles changed - from one department to another, from the public to the private sector and back again. People move around a lot, everyone has her eye on some other, slightly better situation in some other corner of city hall. Plus governments are constantly shuffling and reorganizing and shuttering or condensing departments - they are often byzantine hodge-podges of fractured org charts lying atop a bed of shifting sand.

People do things with terrible motivations and those motivations are selfish and self-interested and financially driven.

Sometimes you've got to just commit to the idea and press forward and trust that you made the right decision.

You can't achieve anything entirely by yourself. There's a support system that is a basic requirement of human existence. To be happy and successful on earth, you just have to have people that you rely on.

As a viewer of TV shows, I always like shows more when I just feel like the people in charge have a plan. You can just tell sometimes, 'Oh, there's a plan there. They have an idea for how this is going to unfold.'