This is the most disappointing thing musically I've ever been a part of, |
This show is going to be missed. It's going to be a long time before there will be a show like this. |
Until people are arrested, the family won't be satisfied. |
We are already a young team, and now we face the possibility of losing a junior and senior for our first game in the North. Courtland is a good blocker, runner and brings a lot of experience so we are going to miss him a lot. |
We did take a look, this spring and summer, when reporters started showing up to testify and one went to prison, and we said, 'Wait a second, do we want to keep doing this?' ... But we thought the investigation would go all the way to Friday. And we monitored things pretty closely in early September because we didn't want to end up in an awkward situation. We could have moved stories around earlier if we had to. |
We got interested in the idea of, what is the responsibility inside the White House for taking individual responsibility for leaking? ... How does leaking work? Why do people do it? |
We had planned out the entire rest of the season, and it didn't end up being what we thought it was going to be. We have been rewriting frantically over the last couple of weeks. |
We have a very, very large Republican audience that loves to kind of watch the show and throw things at the screen. |
We spent a lot of time . . . trying to figure out how we would deal with it. We had conversations about whether it was even appropriate to continue to do the show without John, frankly. He was such a close friend and a wonderful actor and such a central part of the ensemble and of our lives together as a group. |
We spent a lot of time during the Christmas holidays trying to figure out what we were going to do. We had conversations about whether it was even appropriate to continue to do the show without John. He was such a central part of the ensemble and of our lives together as a group. |
We will be spending time with all the characters that you've cared about ... and talking about where they're going to go and what they're going to do next. |
We wondered, will it be difficult for the audience to watch all these additional episodes that have him in them? He was so wonderful in those episodes we decided it would not be respectful of his work to not air them exactly as they were. |
We're dealing with fictional characters, and so it's difficult to convey to the audience the sense of urgency. This is the right thing to do for the cast and the audience and the material. |
We're now dealing with the death of a character we loved after having dealt with the death of a person we loved. |
We've spent the entire year going back and forth on that question and hearing from people, what they thought, people passionate on one side and another, and have only in the last couple of days made that decision. Which we certainly won't share with you because it would be no fun ... but we have passionate advocates for both candidates in the writers' room and in the producing group, and it's been quite the brawl we've had. |