Aziz Ansari was on 'Parks and Recreation' for, I don't know, what, seven years? And he was a really popular stand-up comedian. He even says that his Netflix show wouldn't have gotten made unless he created it himself. No one was probably willing to put someone like Aziz as the lead in a show until he actually created it himself.
When I was nine, I found a copy of 'Doctor Who: the Making of a Television Series' in the school library. It had a picture of Peter Davison on the front, and it was a formative book for me. It explained all the different departments like the script, cameras, and sets and explained how a television show is put together.
I'm a worker. I like to work and I like to provide work for other people. I like to put people on my show who normally would never have a chance at being on television.
There are certain things that make restaurants work and a certain kind of DNA that people who excel in restaurants need. But it's a lot like life, in the sense that you get out of it what you put into it.
I missed the television train at some point. I don't know what happened, but now I've created a complex about it. I'm missing out on what everybody's watching, and now I can't even begin to think about starting to watch a television show because it's been so long. I don't even have a Netflix account.
Making a television show is a difficult, collaborative, creative endeavor, and it really requires everybody to band together and all work together every day.
I have a lot of intention behind what I put out there. The reason all this stuff I do works together, the environmental and social, collaborating with ballet companies to score a show, the bike tour - all of that stuff comes together through community building with music.
Anybody can put things together that belong together. to put things together that don't go together, and make it work, that takes genius like Mozart's. Yet he is presented in the play Amadeus as a kind of silly boy whom the gods loved.
All of my most significant moments somehow involved music. It's like my life was a John Hughes film and somebody had to put together the perfect soundtrack.
You used to have to make a choice. Is it a serialized television show, or is it a stand-alone or procedural? We were wildly influenced by The X-Files. Even when we created Fringe, it was the same thing. It's the gold standard of all gold standards, in genre television, and it was so wonderful because you felt so much for those characters.
At 25, I made many companies. I was thinking more like a businessman or entrepreneur than a CEO. I created many companies, small companies, medium companies. I tried to be involved in many kinds of activities, in finance, in real estate, in mining.
I made and created a show that my family was all on board with, and we were so excited because we got to work together.
I think television is moving more into movies, particularly with serialization and almost cinematic proportions and expectations. A show like 'Game of Thrones' is a perfect example of that, or even a show like 'The Wire,' which isn't all about instant gratification it's about inviting someone into the long experience of television the way you'd be invited into a theater for two hours. So I think in that way, and the quality of writing in television is probably much better than most film writing.
'Doctor Who' began as family television: a show that kids and their parents and grandparents can all watch, maybe even together, on the sofa.
I'm a comedian, and I like to work on my live show, and if I'm doing television, I don't have time to work on my live show, and I can become a lame comic, and that sucks.
I started making movies in 1977, and I didn't even think about the idea that I would ever be on a television show. Once I finished the 'Guiding Light,' I was like, 'I'm done with television!'