What differentiates leaders is the ability to recover following a mistake. I make mistakes all the time, but I cop to them, apologize, and move on. Contrition is powerful.
The development process is not that simple... When I started working at Fox in '92, the company had decided that dramas were dead: they weren't viable businesses and because newsmagazines were so efficient to produce and financially so much more tolerable than a drama. So that year, our company developed very few dramas.
'Prison Break' on Netflix has generated a whole new generation of viewers.
It's no longer permissible to have sexist comments, but growing up in this industry, I spent time in many other organizations where it was just commonplace for men to talk about how a woman looks or give a woman a little bit of a harder time in a meeting and then say, 'I'm just joking - it's because I care about you.'
We are providing a platform to creators who are expressing their emotions; they are expressing what they are feeling - fears, joys, terror. That's what art is about, and we don't want to censor it, but neither would we permit violence which feels gratuitous or glorified to be on our platform.
When I got the first e-mail suggesting we cast Zooey Deschanel in 'New Girl', I thought, 'That's exactly right.' In the pilot of 'Modern Family', when Cam is holding up the baby with the 'Lion King' theme, it was very clear we had something special.
