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If you go to pilot then you are probably going to go to series. That's my feeling about it.

At the end of the day, it's really, really difficult to make a brand-new show, to write a pilot where you have to introduce characters and everyone has to kind of be dynamic and have something different for themselves.

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.

The reason I've never gone for pilot season even as a younger actor, and wouldn't entertain that sort of thing now, is the idea of signing a piece of paper that binds me for six or seven years.

Pilots are so hard because you have to introduce all these characters, you have to hook an audience, and an audience has such a smaller attention span than maybe they used to have.

There's this funny thing with pilots that you have to sign the contract to do the whole job before you're even offered the part. And they make about a million pilots a year, but hardly any of them get turned into series.

My main worry is that after a certain point you become so identified with a character and a series that you might not be able to get work when your show goes off the air.

When you accept a role in a pilot, you automatically sign up for five years. You think it's scary to walk down the aisle? Try signing a five-year contract for a show you may not want to be part of down the road.

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.

It is cool to make a pilot because you get to do all the fun stuff, and then you get to leave when all the tough stuff starts.