I don't speak a lot when I get home, during the season. It's great. I just get to sit and listen. My wife gets to tell me whatever she wants to tell me, and I don't talk. I'm too exhausted to talk, so I'm a very good listener.

Even if you go out there and try to make the most vanilla, non-offensive TV show possible, people are going to criticize you for doing that. It's just part of the game. You can't let it get to you.

I don't speak a lot when I get home, during the season. It's great. I just get to sit and listen. My wife gets to tell me whatever she wants to tell me, and I don't talk. I'm too exhausted to talk, so I'm a very good listener.

Having the audience know more than the characters is precisely where you want to be in terms of drama. You can engage them much more when that is the case.

The biggest compliment? I would say, "You helped me." I think in terms of life, not just with acting. But certainly with storytelling, being able to hold up a mirror and allow someone to relate to a story and see something in themselves to the extent that you're in service to another human being - I don't know why else we're here. To know that I helped someone would be the biggest compliment I could ever receive.

You're going to run into a great deal of opinions. I think that's just fertile ground for us. What else would you want to write a show about than something that is that much of a pressure cooker, that has that much influence and impact? We're going to run into a lot of different opinions, but it's inspiring to me that newsmen and newswomen have reached out and said how thrilled they are with what we're doing.

I think the media's primarily an interesting backdrop - a fertile backdrop, in which we can discuss a great deal involving the human condition. We're not trying to lecture the media on how it should be doing its job or lecture people on who they should be voting for, but it does provide an incredible backdrop on which we can paint a lot of pictures and open up a lot of discussions.