A Quote by Rob Lowe
We had shot six episodes of the West Wing season when 9/11 happened. An extraordinary thing that would never happen today is Aaron going to the network and saying, "I think we need to go back and reshoot, I have something I want to do," and the network just kind of let him do it.
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I feel like network didn't want me. I was doing all these pilots, and it never worked out. I was like, network doesn't like me. I'm going to go to cable where I'm appreciated. Then it was funny; I think I had to go to cable for network to appreciate me.
When you only do 10 episodes for a final season, every character and all of her interactions in every storyline have so much more import because it's the last time we're going to do it. It's been really helpful saying, "OK, where do we want each of these characters to end?" We have 10 episodes to do it and working backward from that, I kind of envy my friends who have always been on a cable network because this is really that great benefit of doing it this way.
Actually, if I had to do it over [leaving the show the West Wing], I'd do the same thing, because lost in the shuffle of it is that Aaron [Sorkin] left the same year I did. And I would not have wanted to be on The West Wing with somebody else writing it.
When we were doing 'The West Wing,' the hardest thing about doing 'The West Wing' was being compared to yourself. You go out there and want every episode to be as good as your best episode. I wrote 88 episodes of 'The West Wing,' and when you do that, one of them is going to be your 88th best, so your 88th best better be pretty good.
I like the end of the year to be about something. Especially with younger shows, the network pushes you to make self-contained episodes; they don't like them to be serialized: 'We want this one to be funny for someone who's never watched it and will never watch again.' And I go 'Why would anyone want to do it like that?'
I remember when I did the pilot, and I though no network is going to want to do this. How could that happen? A half Chinese guy walking the old west that doesn't fire one gun and never gets on a horse?
The universe works in mysterious ways and for me it worked out perfectly. With all respect to everybody else, Aaron Sorkin is and was The West Wing, full stop. There's no West Wing without him.
Some people think it's because '24' was jump-started by what happened on 9/11. That was never why we made the show. We started production six months prior to 9/11, and we'd already done ten episodes.
I've been on my share of network dramas and comedies, and the problem sometimes in a network is they have a single-minded focus on making the show true to whatever genre it is. If you're on a drama, it better be procedural, it better fulfill all the demands of a procedural show, and you better keep those episodes independent, so if I'm watching the show in seven years as its syndicated on some other cable network, I don't have to know what happened before or after the episode. If you're on a comedy, everything has to be funny and wacky and zany.
Larry David called me and said, "You can never watch The West Wing again. Either the show is going to be great without you and you're going to be miserable, or the show is going to be less than great without you and you're going to be miserable." So I had them send a tape of the first episode that I didn't do. I put it in the VCR and I don't think I got 15 seconds in before I leapt up and slammed it off! It felt like I was watching somebody make out with my girlfriend. I've never seen a West Wing episode in seasons five, six or seven.
I respect the hell out of everyone who does a network show. That is a marathon. It's so many episodes, and it can be a meat grinder. Anyone making a network show, and on top of that making a very good network show, that's an insane feat of Herculean endurance and fortitude.
It started back in 2002, when there was hardly any reality television. 'Survivor' had just started. My hope and dream was that 'The Bachelor' would last one or two nights on network TV, so I might meet somebody in the network and then I could get a real job.
I think we all know what actually happened. It was a good old boy network, and there was no such thing as a good old girl network.
We do 32 episodes a season and will have shot 267 episodes by the end of the ninth season... It's impossible to sell that many episodes in the foreign market.
The territory has changed, and a lot of really good actors want to do cable series, but they don't necessarily want to do network TV and make the commitment of 22 episodes or whatever. They find that the liberties and the creative freedoms that you get in cable is more interesting to them than the censorship of a network show.
Being in the industry, I've seen many situations where someone will get the call from the network where they say 'You guys have 5 episodes to wrap it up.' Then all your long-term story arcs gotta get wrapped up in five episodes because that's how many episodes you got left. I would hate to see that happen to 'Castle'.
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