I'm perfectly happy to color within the network lines when I have to.

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.

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.

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 don't want my writing to be recognized.