Time & Perspective Quote by David Selby

There is a particular kind of actorly diplomacy in David Selby’s phrasing: the careful balance between calling out uncertainty and still crediting craft. “I don’t think they knew exactly where they were going” lands like a small confession about the reality of long-running television and franchise storytelling, where characters aren’t always engineered so much as discovered under deadline pressure. It’s an anti-myth statement, puncturing the fan-friendly fantasy that every twist was planned from day one.

Then Selby pivots: “but they lay those stories out ahead of time.” That “but” is doing reputational work. He’s reframing creative indecision not as chaos, but as a looser kind of structure: the writers may not have had a GPS, but they had a map. The repetition of “idea” and “exactly” is telling, too. Selby isn’t accusing anyone of winging it; he’s describing a middle state familiar to actors who live inside serialized narratives, where you’re asked to play emotional truth even when the future is foggy.

The subtext is about trust and labor. Actors build continuity from fragments: a line here, a motivation there, a handful of “they wanted it to go” clues. Selby’s tone suggests respect for that collaborative gamble, while quietly noting how much of character is retrofitted after the fact. In the age of prestige “five-season arcs,” it’s also a reminder that older models of storytelling often relied on momentum, mood, and improvisational problem-solving rather than rigid master plans.