I'm really trying to just keep this internal, and be faithful to the story and the characters, and keep 99.9% of my brain there, serving the story. It's a great network. It's the golden network of cable, so it's totally an honor to be there and tell this story, but I try not to think about anything beyond that.

Seattle is beautiful. You look at the sky and it's one of the most beautiful skies in the world, and then there's the Puget Sound, which will kill you, if you fall into it, but it's also beautiful. Seattle is a city of contradictions. It's the most liberal and most literate city in America, and it has Starbucks and [Bill] Gates, but it's also where the Green River killer hunted women and where the runaway population is just shocking when you walk the streets. Within the same city, there's darkness and light.

By not foretelling the ending to yourself, as a writer, you're able to open up the canvas and say, "I'm going to go here. I'm going to go there." It's just a little bit more freeing than a stand-alone procedural, where you work backwards from the end.

I've always been kind of drawn to the extremities of human nature. I wrote my first screenplay when I was 16. The initial idea was a friendship between two prostitutes, and I spent time with a vice squad guy in Cincinnati who brought me to a brothel and gave me the rundown on how street prostitution works.

We read novels. We read hundreds of pages of words, when the story is good because we're willing to stay there. I hope the story is good. I'm going into this venture thinking that the audience is really smart and really wants to hear all the nuances of what we're saying.

I am endlessly fascinated by this notion that everyone has a secret. Some of our secrets are tiny, small things, and some of them are huge. Given that reality of the human condition, that's what our characters will go through. There will be some things where you'll just be like, "What the hell! How the hell did that happen?"

But, for the role of Sarah Linden, we saw everybody. Everybody wanted this role. Every female actor in town really wanted to play a real woman and be in this drama. It was incredible that all these women were coming in. And then, Mireille [Enos] walked in the door and she was reading the lines that I had written, and I saw her in that field. I was like, "Wow, she's the one."