Life & Wisdom Quote by Marc Cherry

Cherry’s line is a preemptive shrug dressed up as creative candor: a way of lowering the audience’s expectations without admitting defeat. “Yes” is doing quiet damage control, answering complaints that are already in the air. The casualness of “some new stuff” frames experimentation as inevitable and harmless, while “might work” and “might not” converts criticism into the normal churn of production rather than a referendum on taste or skill. It’s the language of a showrunner speaking from inside a machine that never stops moving.

The key move is the appeal to “the nature of episodic television,” a phrase that sounds like a neutral law of physics but functions like a shield. Episodic TV is a long game: writers’ rooms change, network notes arrive, actors leave, budgets tighten, storylines get extended because ratings spike or truncated because they don’t. Cherry’s subtext is that inconsistency isn’t just forgivable, it’s structural. If you want the steadiness of a novel, don’t come to a medium designed around deadlines and course correction.

“They can’t all be gems” lands with a faintly wry, almost parental patience. It’s also a subtle recalibration of what viewers are owed. In the prestige era, audiences are trained to expect every episode to feel curated and cinematic; Cherry pushes back toward an older bargain: television as a weekly relationship, not a perfect artifact. The intent isn’t only to excuse a weaker installment, but to defend risk-taking as the price of keeping a long-running series alive.