Everyone in Hollywood who is successful becomes less successful at some point. I'm just trying to delay that fall for as long as I can.

I was never that kid who grew up in New York and was always at the arthouse watching important films. I was the kid who grew up in the Midwest where there weren't any art films, and I watched TV. And that was really the medium that affected me and that I fell in love with.

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.

I have no problem at all going back and forth between cable and network.

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.

In order to appeal to a wider audience on network in order to survive, generally your characters need to be, at a base level, a little bit more likable.

TV is just such a fast-moving medium that you do what you can do, and what you can't do, you don't worry about too much.