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Everyone loves a slice of period-drama-pie, but I think the success of 'Upstairs Downstairs' is really down to the wonderful format that Jean Marsh and Eileen Atkins created.

Like 'Twin Peaks,' '24,' 'Mad Men,' and 'The Sopranos' before it, 'Downton Abbey' enriches the iconography and collective lore of pop culture. It replenishes the stream.

You can't imagine parlor ballads drifting out of high-rise multi-towered buildings. That kind of music existed in a more timeless state of life.

It was only through getting interested in more out-there and avant-garde forms that the musical suddenly seemed like such a wonderful genre to me.

Producers want to put their music behind revivals but I don't think that's a good trend for the theater at all.

For 'Narrow Stairs', the majority of the songs I brought in were guitar songs - songs we could sit in a room and just play. I can honestly say I had more fun and felt more inspired on this record than anything that we had done in a long time.

I think that it's interesting how shows like 'Walking Dead' or even 'Game of Thrones,' with all its fantasy elements, have become so popular. Sometimes, though, I get a little bit annoyed because the whole nerd thing taking over and is now cool, and it wasn't cool when I was younger.

House music originated in America, and it has always been around, but I guess it just got a tighter hold on Europe and other parts of the world.

It's like a piece of music; you never lose sight of the theme. Each scene pushes off to the next like music builds and you can almost hear the next chord progression, so it has a strict structure, which is very compelling.

I sort of was inspired by 'Friday Night Lights,' where it was a very different show, but similar in that they were both large ensemble dramas where you had many stories going on at once. I wanted to do a show that shared that element, and that's really why I wanted to develop 'Parenthood' as a series.