Dana Walden

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.'

It's hard to tell why something touches a zeitgeist and when that same show doesn't in other places.

To be a great creator, you have to be vulnerable. You're creating characters that have a little bit of yourself in them... And you want to know it's a safe environment for that.

My mother had no interest in cartoons. I remember thinking, 'I am never going to grow into that person.' Which is so ironic - now I get to work on 'Family Guy' and 'The Simpsons' and 'Futurama', all of these great animated series! TV was my passion.

Our news is Fox News. It's a cable channel and has nothing to do, frankly, with the entertainment area of the company. It's the model of how this company was launched, and there are a lot of independent stations and Fox O&Os who have hugely successful news that our programming is the lead-in for.

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.

In 1995, I had been chosen to make a short presentation about the state of the TV business at a company retreat in Santa Barbara. At the time, I felt we were not real competitors in network television. The studio wasn't prolific; we didn't have much of a brand.

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.

I think the best entertainment tackles social issues in a sort of seamless way.

You have to develop a broad range of projects. One thing we've seen with 'This Is Us' is that people want to escape a little bit into the lives of others with beautiful emotional storylines where a country that needs a good cry can have one without seeming crazy. So I would say my real takeaway is that we should all be pushing for extreme emotion.

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.

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.