The grunt work of carving out a TV episode

I loved this quote from David Chase, the brains behind The Sopranos, featured in a longer GQ article about James Gandolfini:

“Other people have good ideas. And they’re hard to come by. But in another sense, they’re a dime a dozen,” he tells me. “Turning an idea into an episode—that’s the grunt work. The organization can rest for a day or so, secure in the notion that we’ve got an idea. But eventually the showrunner’s the one who has to look at his watch and say, ‘How do we fill up forty-two minutes?’ We can all sit around and decide we want to make a Louis XIV table, but eventually somebody has to do the carving.”