Working as a showrunner has made it tougher to watch other shows and movies.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Series finales have that responsibility to leave you feeling good about entire series. You want to feel like the viewer closes the book satisfied. And if you strike out on the finale it skews how you feel about the entire series.

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.