I've spent a lot of time thinking about what the audience would want. That's my job, is to anticipate ahead of the audience.

I've always read a lot of historical books and I'm a big fan of documentaries, and I've always thought of ways to do it.

You can make a good show, but you still need some magical alchemy to get people to watch.

There are certain economics involved in making a network TV show that you want to amortize the costs of that, so the more episodes you make, the cheaper they all are individually.

There are story-room sessions where you think about the big picture, like a novel, but once you have certain things in place, you have to treat each episode like an hour of TV, and think that maybe this will be the only episode that anyone will ever watch. You want to have some sort of beginning, middle, and end to the episode, even if you have storylines that are carrying over. You still want it to feel like a cohesive hour of entertainment. And you can't think about both at the same time.

Cheers was one of the first shows where I paid attention to the writers because their [work] was better than everything else I was watching. The writers weren't afraid to let a joke fall slightly flat if it advanced the characters.

I think the bar is higher these days in terms of audience expectations of authenticity.