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

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

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.

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'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.

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.

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.