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Being in the industry, I've seen many situations where someone will get the call from the network where they say 'You guys have 5 episodes to wrap it up.' Then all your long-term story arcs gotta get wrapped up in five episodes because that's how many episodes you got left. I would hate to see that happen to 'Castle'.

I think there are ways in which shows can pop their heads up a little bit in the morass of everything you can watch.

At one time, whenever the hell it was, they wanted a character to come in and stir up the pot. They brought me in for 8-10 episodes and said we'll try it for that.

How that works is our first season was the year we had a threatened writers' strike, so what we did was that instead of doing 22 episodes, we did 30. We put 10 in the bank.

I feel terrible for directors of TV because all the episodes have to look the same. They make a great series for five or six years, and then when it's canceled, they can't break out on their own.

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.

Having the games on TV, I've always believed it's like watching a soap opera - fans can't wait for the next episode.

We worked under a lot of pressure... three days to do an episode, sometimes two in a week, 39 episodes a year.

The great thing about working in cable is that, since the season is truncated - we only do 12 shows - the writers are more at ease in terms of mapping out the trajectory of the story and the characters.

I don't think, by the way, that any network would have given us their show to release all 13 episodes once ahead of them, and the same way, I don't think any studio will give us their movies to release the same day they are in the theaters - not yet, not yet.