Television has never known what to do with grief, which resists narrative: the dramas of grief are largely internal - for the bereaved, it is a chaotic, intense, episodic period, but the chaos is by and large subterranean, and easily appears static to the friendly onlooker who has absorbed the fact of loss and moved on.
So then I started doing a lot of episodic TV, just car chases or helicopter chases or whatever.
Yes, we're trying some new stuff. Some of it might work. Some of it might not. This, of course, is the nature of episodic television. They can't all be gems.
Being a regular in a television series, for me - if I wanted to be a cop, I woulda went to cop school. If I wanted to be a doctor, I would've gone to medical school. You get trapped in your normal episodic television shows, basically doing the same thing.
One thing I'm working on is an episodic web series titled 'One Warm Night.' It's a kinda crazy, quirky series, filled with a lot of misfits, oddballs... ninjas.
One of my first episodic jobs was on 'Twin Peaks,' if you can imagine that - one of the most unusual series ever.
Certainly, the poverty, the discrimination, the episodic unemployment could not but strike an inquiring youngster: why did these exist, and what could we do about them.
With every episodic, there's a learning curve where writers try to find the voice of the characters by way of the actors. Many details are found along the way. On 'Caprica,' although the franchise already existed, we were creating an entirely new world full of new characters.
It was acting, and WWE is the longest-running weekly episodic program in television. Sure, there are story lines that are better than others.
I've done episodic television and some other things that have been written by other people.