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The first season of a show is kind of like an extended pilot. You're only really on the map if it goes a second season.

I think it's not uncommon for new television shows to spend certainly the first year, but without a doubt, like, the first eight or ten episodes, kind of figuring out what the show is.

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.

I tend to write the episodes in the middle of the season, which can be a challenge because you've got to balance all these threads that have begun - and also make sure they will make sense with the overall plan going forward.

I did an episode on the TV show 'Awake,' and I thought, 'Wow, that's really hard.' To do that so fast and to do that, if it's very successful, for nine months out of the year, for a bunch of good years, that's challenging. But, it was interesting. It's a good show. You'd have to have a very good character, I guess.

I believe that 99 percent of successful TV shows change an immense amount from the pilot to the tenth or twelfth episode.

When we were doing 'The West Wing,' the hardest thing about doing 'The West Wing' was being compared to yourself. You go out there and want every episode to be as good as your best episode. I wrote 88 episodes of 'The West Wing,' and when you do that, one of them is going to be your 88th best, so your 88th best better be pretty good.

I think you have to do certain things in the pilot to get your network's attention - to break through... So maybe you push a little further in the first show.

Although there were only about 24 episodes made it seems to run forever. They take a couple of episodes and put them together, making a feature film once in a while. I had good fun making the series.