Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Last Friday night, I Twitted a photograph of myself that I intended to send as a direct message as part of a joke to a woman in Seattle. Once I realized I posted to Twitter I panicked, I took it down and said that I had been hacked. I then continued with that story, to stick to that story which was a hugely regrettable mistake.
If there is anything good to be said about my particular line of work, it's that we get to tell people the news they need to hear, and to put it in context. To get to that - for one hour every night on the 'PBS NewsHour,' and for an additional half-hour every Friday night on 'Washington Week,' we have to slog through a lot of tough stuff.
I played with a band in Austin when I was doing 'Friday Night Lights.' It was a blast.
The most frustrating thing to me is when I tell people I work on 'Friday Night Lights,' they'll say, 'Oh, I hear that's a really good show.' They never watched it.
In terms of 'American Horror Story' and 'Nashville,' what attracted me to those, and 'Friday Night Lights,' for that matter, is that they felt like something innovative and something that we hadn't seen before. As an actor, that's exciting.
I look at 'Friday Night Lights' as one of my all-time favorite series finales, and that is what you want. After all the roads you've traveled with these people, you just want to know that they're going to be happy. I'm a big believer in shows that make that choice.
There's a lot of progress happening in TV. You have amazing shows like 'How to Get Away With Murder.' You have people like Shonda Rhimes, Lee Daniels with 'Empire,' and Jason Katims with 'Friday Night Lights' and 'Parenthood.' You have people behind the scenes writing complex women.
With 'Friday Night Lights,' we were encouraged to make it our own and improvise as much as we wanted.
In 'Friday Night Lights,' the relationship between the coach and his wife, that marriage was something that you couldn't really understand until you actually saw it exist on film.
In the past I'd always felt like 'the girl' in the show or the movie. On 'Friday Night Lights' there were a bunch of girls, and I was the woman. Initially there was a little struggle with my identity around that. But now there's a sense of ease.
Speaking only for myself, the ideal finale to me is 'Friday Night Lights,' where you have loved and worshipped a show for all these years, you get to come back, celebrate the characters, finish up their journeys, and send everyone out with a feeling of, 'My God, I'm so grateful that I got to know these people.'
We got spoiled with 'Friday Night Lights.' Not every show is like that, and on other shows, if you try to bring that same truth or that same approach, the system of television doesn't always allow for that level of collaboration, which is unfortunate because the work would be richer.
'Friday Night Lights' was kind of like my college years because I did four seasons of that. It was my first series. It was the most time I had with one character, and kind of growing and evolving with the character over that long of a span of time, it just allows you to sort of learn in a completely different way that I had never experienced.
Something that I learned from 'Friday Night Lights,' sometimes if you have four or five scenes in an episode, it's not having less than having 10. It's what you do with those scenes.
We're trying to tell a very full story of 'Nashville' and these characters in Nashville, and I'm really hopeful that we're going to be able to do something as innovative as 'American Horror Story' and 'Friday Night Lights.' And I think so far, we're on the right path for that.
I started shooting 'The Defenders' two days after I wrapped' Friday Night Lights.' I was doing research for 'The Defenders' throughout - interviewing lawyers and sitting in courtrooms just to watch - but there's something fun about throwing yourself in the water and learning by doing.
What's great is that I keep hearing from people who are discovering 'Friday Night Lights' because of streaming and Netflix and Hulu and all of these things. Somehow... things don't get old as fast as they used to. They stay vibrant.
The shows I've been working on, especially 'Parenthood' and 'Friday Night Lights,' I think are completely character-driven stories. I think, for most writers, that's a privilege to be telling those kinds of stories. It's erroneous to me.
As much as I thought the end of 'Friday Night Lights' was a really great ending, I was one of those people who wanted to make it into a movie. Even though it ultimately didn't work to do that movie, I did work with some of the other writers and by myself writing a script for that.
I sort of was inspired by 'Friday Night Lights,' where it was a very different show, but similar in that they were both large ensemble dramas where you had many stories going on at once. I wanted to do a show that shared that element, and that's really why I wanted to develop 'Parenthood' as a series.
I came to NBC on 'Friday Night Lights' and they have supported that show and found ways - unprecedented ways - to keep it on the air for a long time. And when I came to them with the idea of doing 'Parenthood,' they not only supported me in doing it but also got behind it in such a way that we were able to put together this incredible cast.