Lorne Michaels on the Importance of Having Boundaries

“To me, there’s no creativity without boundaries.  If you’re gonna write a sonnet it’s 14 lines, so it’s solving the problem within the container … and I think for me commercial television and those boundaries, I like it.  I like that you can’t use certain language.  I like that you have to be bright enough to figure out how to get your ideas across in that amount of time with intelligence being the thing that you hope is showing … not officially, but you want it to be, oh, that was kind of bright.  We have really good writers here.  I think I can safely say that
a lot of people in comedy did their best work here.”