You can t be motivated by fame because the odds are that you re not going to be famous. Any good writer that I ve worked with, and I ve been fortunate to have worked with a lot of good ones, they all have some character. Story is very important, story is what drives television because every week you have to come up with a plot. But stories are no good if they don t derive from the characters, if they don t come naturally out of who the people are. It always has to come out of character, and then the character has to serve the story.
Fame is just silly.
If you can t write character and story you re never going to be famous anyway. Writing for Frasier was great because the show had great characters but the relationships between the characters were even better. The sexual tension between Daphne and Niles, the sort of combative relationship whenever Roz was with Niles. If you look at any two characters in Frasier, any two people in the cast if you put them together they have a unique relationship. None of them resemble each other, there s a different dynamic, which give you more to write from.