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When you're doing a network show in the States, you're just a slave to the ratings. There's so much money invested that there's this pervasive atmosphere of fear and anxiety. Every morning after an episode of your show airs, everyone is fixated on the numbers to try and determine how the show did.

I think that the problem with network television is that they cling to the whole business model like they are clinging to the side of a cliff.

With network, shows are pulled half the time after three episodes whether they're good or they're not good. It's a numbers game. With cable, they can take a lot more liberties.

Obviously with the Internet and increased access to other means of watching shows, the audience has dispersed and is all over the place and that is a challenge.

Technology is changing, so the viewership is getting broken up. My kids watch everything downloaded; they have no idea what the numbers or the names of the channels mean, except 'FX makes the show that I see on my computer.'

I actually think there's a potential, a crazy potential, that network TV could become something valuable and worthwhile, just because of fear on the part of the networks.

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.

Viewers don't care how big media companies are. They care whether they can dump those they don't like, whether because of lousy service or because of crummy shows.

Television viewers, they've been around a long time. They've been watching this thing now for 50 years. I mean, they know exactly what's happening when it comes to television programming. You can't put anything over on them anymore.

You know, people aren't watching a network: they're watching cable channels.