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You have a schedule that you really have to stick to with TV and make sure that you are producing enough film for the network to edit through and air quickly.

The schedule of doing a live TV show every week is very difficult.

The real challenge in doing a TV show is in what I would call the maintenance energy. You take that creative energy and you use it every week, of course. But you then need to maintain the quality of the stories, and it's harder to do.

The funny thing about television is that once you start to do it you never get time to watch it.

TV is designed a certain way where you have three, four days on stage and three or four days out. You're basically making a feature every seven days. You have to shoot an hour's worth.

TV is starting to become such a collective experience again. People are watching it on their own time, rather than being on a schedule. Netflix offers the easy opportunity to watch as much as you can.

I think the rigors of a TV schedule are brutal and 'Six Feet Under' wasn't a network schedule. We did 13 shows, we didn't do 22. I don't know how people do that. I really don't. I mean the shows are shorter, but wow, it's quite a discipline.

On a television show, you basically make a movie a week. Movies take three months - it's crazy. They're so slow, it's like vacation to me.

A lot of the television industry is so cookie-cutter. In general, there are so many shows that are easy and bland to watch. You can tune in at any time and know exactly where you are in the story arc because it's pretty much the same every week.

So much of television is incredibly predictable. You watch the first five minutes and you know where it's going to go. If you can just create an element of surprise in both the storytelling and tone of a show, you're going to be way ahead of the pack.