I mean, my dad's a television producer, and I knew I could get a job as an assistant or a reader with one of his friends, but it wasn't exactly what I wanted to do.
My dad used to put me in front of the TV screen and made me watch old Jimmy Durante and Dean Martin movies. I just always loved entertainment.
My dad was an interior design and furniture person. I started working with him for four years before my first TV writing break.
I look at each episode in two ways - from a design standpoint and from an entertainment standpoint - this is TV, after all. We usually succeed on at least one of the levels.
My favorite is doing the television show, as a variety show, every week. If the show wasn't that great one week, we could always come back and apologize, you know?
I prefer theater and film. I did a little television, and obviously I'm not knocking it. It can be great, and it does pay the bills. But it's a little bit more disjointed.
You have to be on TV a surprisingly long time before you're stopped on the street. Then, when you are, you get a lot of, 'Hey, you're great! What's your name again?'
One of the great things about doing series television is the guest actors that you can have come on and play around with.
Directors, like actors, get typecast. And because I've had great success with comedy and horror and TV shows, that's basically what I'm kind of offered.
Around 5th and 6th grade I thought Dean Martin was the coolest guy in the world; he was a great singer, had his own television show and acted in movies.
I'm pretty excited about the state of TV these days. There's great opportunity for really complicated relationships, in a way that I don't really see as much in movies anymore.
Theatre is the principal job of an actor. An actor's job is to tell a story to someone in a room. TV and film can be great and I really love doing it, but it is a different way of telling a story.
In entertainment, whether it's movies or television or whatever, I'm a great audience, but I don't remember the names of the people I've seen or the groups that I've heard.
I'm incredibly proud of 'Hannibal' and the cast - I feel like we're doing really good television.
The thing about TV is it's a meritocracy. I love that aspect of it - and I've had shows that have gone on the air and been canceled. I've seen the good and the bad of it.
We watch so many TV shows and movies about jaded or corrupt policemen, we forget people join the police force to do good, and they really care about that.
I don't make any distinction between a popular TV series or blockbuster film and doing Shakespeare. They're different, but as long as the material is good and the intention is honourable, it's all the same to me.
If you try to kill yourself for a role on the TV show, you'll succeed. It's too long, it's too much. So, it's tough, but the challenge is a good thing.
Because good writing in a TV cartoon is so rare, I think the animation on The Simpsons is often overlooked.
There was definitely a lack of any sort of villain in the Clinton era, which is why, when Columbine happened, it was easy to pick on me. My face was around, and it made good TV.
And dialogue, I'm good at it, and it's because it's the only thing you have to work with in TV writing.
