First, he says tempo is all. He says that when he first looks at picture, he tries to find the natural tempo, going to the extent that initially he just works with a metronome before even thinking about anything else.
One thing to note here - he also says Vince Gilligan shows are unusual in that they have the luxury of time. He tends to work with something very close to locked picture, and I know the term "picture lock" is treated as a joke these days. So this is one where the reality of production can blow away all that forensic work of finding the tempo.
The second is themes and leitmotif. He makes an interesting observation here regarding TV in particular.
This seemed such a smart answer. He does go on to say he does use a leitmotif for Carol but only in a very specific context and then very lightly.Yeah, we do talk about that, and actually we've employed that a little more in this series [Pluribus] than we have in previous stuff that we've all worked on together. But the truth is, for me anyways, in the medium of television, especially when people are watching multiple episodes back to back probably a lot of the time. The theme thing can get real overdone real quick. And it can be a little maudlin almost in a way.
So there are plenty of shows that I've worked on and that are out there that rely on those themes and they can be a powerful thing, especially if you're working on a show where, for example, your main character is who he or she is and appears, and you wanna know that he appears, right? And you have that sense that there's an expectation and an understanding about what that person is or does.
But in these kinds of shows, you guys are creating characters that are shifting and evolving so much all the time, that in order to have a leitmotif for Carol, we'd have to be constantly evolving that leitmotif, which one could do, but it's such musical gymnastics to do that it would be distracting ultimately.