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.

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.

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.

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.

To this day, nothing makes me happier than finding a TV show I really love.

I don't want my writing to be so unique that when you apply it to different genres, it seems like the previous show that people know you from.

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.