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Usually pilot season is very busy, and there are lots of auditions and lots of near misses and rejections. This year, I had two auditions, landed this role and it felt like being home again.

Increasingly, there's much better material on television, but there's not always the time and money to make it, so you've got to make sure you make it in the right place. It also depends on time commitment; a lot of directors will make a pilot, but a series is just a whole other level of involvement.

You hope for that with anything, but with a TV show, the writer and the actor being the right mix are more important than the actual writing of the pilot because you hope it's something that can have a long life.

Pilot season tends to be grueling, because you can be thrown all of these auditions at once - last-minute, always - and you're going on three a day, especially back in the day.

A pilot is like the most extensive dress rehearsal you can ever imagine, because the writers are learning about the actors, the actors are learning about the characters.

Everyone loves each other for the pilot. But once you start to do the show, you see everybody's true colors. If it's successful, people start to change, and then if it's not doing well, people start to change in other ways.

As I slowly managed to take what I had learned into a transition from contestant to announcer and warm-up, I first had to prove myself on pilots. And as you know, many pilots are taped for each show that is lucky enough to breakthrough to being a series.

When I first began doing TV pilots, my expectations were high. I didn't understand that world. So when 'Weeds' took off, I was so happy. Especially as I was just a guest star in the pilot. But once it got picked up, they made me a regular cast member.

I really love the process, with stage, of rehearsal, you get to create a character, and you have a beginning, a middle, and an end of story. And in television, you don't.

The pilot is a sales tool; it introduces you to the characters and might set the template for what the show is meant to be, but there's so many boxes you have to check off on a pilot that it can sort of hurt the storytelling in a way.