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When we started looking at the bigger television ecosystem, you see that there's not that many serialized TV shows being made for TV. The economics are lousy: They don't sell into syndication well; they're expensive to produce.

Cable series have more time to focus on characters, and a structure that allows for a development in character as you go along. Network shows have a pressure of time and space that is completely different.

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.

It used to be that you had to do a certain number of episodes to hit syndication in order to try to keep a show on, because it's important to the network because it sells good commercial time. That's really not how HBO does things.

When I can control my own show, I want the price to be affordable so fans can actually see me. It's a challenge because I have to do a lot of navigating to make the production stellar but do it on a realistic budget.

The making of television has changed quite a bit. Now you have to do them n cheaper budgets.

There are only a few TV networks that really invest in production in the way that I think they should. HBO, obviously, is one of them.

The television business is based on managed dissatisfaction. You're watching a great television show you're really wrapped up in? You might get 50 minutes of watching a week and then 18,000 minutes of waiting until the next episode comes along.

Networks can typically invest tens of millions of dollars in the development of a pilot. And if they put the show on the air and it fails, that's all lost money. There's no monetization of a broken series.

The shows you can do in cable are just more buzzworthy and are about subject matter that's more unusual or dark. And broadcast shows tend to be more mainstream or middle-of-the-road.