Unmissable show?

Who watches anything live any more? I’m looking forward to Better Call Saul’s return. I really enjoyed last season. I’m watching Mr Robot. I thought it was a little style-conscious for my tastes but now it’s really sucking me in. I find it really disturbing. Also Doc Martin, that show with Martin Clunes playing a country doctor. My grandfather got me hooked!

Earliest TV memory?

I was what we used to call in the States a ‘latchkey kid’, kids that came from divorced families and whose parents worked. When you got out of school and got home after school, the TV was your babysitter. So television was a huge part of my adolescence. It was the coin of the realm, and We always negotiated for extra time with our parents. My father at one point claimed he didn’t have a television and then my sister and I found it, and we would plug it in and watch it while he was gone, and then would cool it off with a hairdryer before he came home, so he would never know. We were so addicted that we actually used to listen to our neighbours television through the wall. So It’s no surprise that I made a career in television!

Bring back…

Deadwood. It was such an exceptional show: Ian McShane’s work on that was like an acting class every week. And it got cancelled. They made some noise about doing some films but I don’t think anything ever came of it. I’d like to see that come back. Would I bring back ER? Well, they bring it back all the time but just call it something else: Night Shift or Casualty Room or something. There have been plenty of fast-paced medical shows with good-looking casts in the last couple of years. Hospital dramas are part of the television landscape. There will always be one or two of them. I don’t know if ER’s impact will ever be replicated, though. It was a show that hit that last gasp when network television had all the power. And it captured public attention in a profound way.

Pitch us a TV show…

Remember that film George Clooney did a couple of years ago called The Monuments Men? It was about an army unit in world war two made up of art historians that was tasked with protecting the looted art that the Nazis were carting off. I had an idea that one of the Monument Men’s grandsons comes across his grandfather’s war diary where he notices some clues. The gist of it is that there was one cache of paintings that was never recovered. He’s not the only one looking for it: the grandsons of the Nazis who hid it are also after it. So it’s sort of an international art hunt. Indiana Jones with a little bit of The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

Mastermind specialist subject?

’ll take television medicine [laughs]. No, actually kind of a history buff, so I’ll go withThe Lincoln assassination. As an actor what immediately interested me was that John Wilkes Booth’s family was the most famous theatrical family in America. His father, Junius Brutus Booth, was a famous actor, his brother was the definitive Hamlet of his day and rival to England’s Henry Irving, and he was a reputable actor in his own right. The modern equivalent would be Alec Baldwin shooting the president!

Season two of The Librarians begins Monday, 8pm, Syfy