Nothing makes me happier than to have a smart person tell me why the show is smart, especially if I didn't intend that. I tend to be a very instinctual writer, and I don't plot shows out like, "This is my thesis and this is how I'm going to subtly sneak my thesis into this episode." I just approach it from, "We know these characters well, here are the situations that they're in, now how would they behave? What would the consequences be?" And it's always fun to see how people interpret that and dissect it afterward, and make me and the other writers seem probably smarter than we really are.

The worst thing you can do is end up with a network show on cable or end up with a cable show on network.

I'm very humble in terms of knowing that television is an extraordinary collaborative medium and that one person alone cannot make a great TV show.

There will always be economic pressure to make hits, identify hits, and then exploit hits. And you're going to exploit them with as many episodes as you probably can.

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.

One of the tricky things about running a TV show is that you just never know how good the guest stars you cast on a weekly basis, how good they're going to be in the episode. Sometimes they surprise you in good ways and sometimes they surprise you in disappointing ways.

When you start a TV show, you're not necessarily thinking, "Are we setting up what we need for season seven?" You're just trying to stay on the air, and you try to learn your job as you go, and do what you can.