On 'Whose Line,' we had six, seven, eight scenes per show, so everything was pretty quick. And there's a lot of games that we just got tired of, like 'Hats' and 'World's Worst' and 'Hoedown' and stuff.
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When we first started, everything was animated, everything was comedy, and there was really nothing that was longer than about two minutes, because that's all audiences would watch.
We constantly run lines together before every show too, and then there's a long, traditionally long, story to tell the audience every show. Today, we're doing it twice.
When I was on 'The Golden Girls,' we'd have eight scenes per show. And when 'Seinfeld' came along, they went to, like, 30 scenes a show, which was revolutionary. 'Arrested Development' has probably got 60 scenes per show. It just keeps emerging as this more and more complex thing. I always try to keep it very simple at its heart.
I think the rigors of a TV schedule are brutal and 'Six Feet Under' wasn't a network schedule. We did 13 shows, we didn't do 22. I don't know how people do that. I really don't. I mean the shows are shorter, but wow, it's quite a discipline.
We've rewritten entire scenes and had them animated twelve hours before the show goes on the air. It's not fun.
Television's so quick, and there's so many other fun elements to it, but you don't get such good scripts and the time to really make much more three dimensional characters.
The shows are either 11 or 22 minutes and they move pretty quickly, and that's part of the charm of them - so it was just trying to keep that in mind and keep the energy of the story moving, even though we were dealing with a longer format.
Characters can become boring. That's what's tricky about television. It goes on and on - you're playing this same character for five seasons and it gets easy to fall into just walking on the set and assuming you know how to play a scene.
I was delighted to have lines when they came - learning lines for film isn't a problem, but television is a little different, because we shot those shows the whole way through.
Why is 'Game of Thrones' the most pirated show in the history of TV? Because people can't get it fast enough, that's why.
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