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Television Quotes

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Television Quotes

“We're not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery - it recharges by running.”

“Retaining 'Monday Night Football' simply did not make smart financial sense for ABC. We could not reconcile the fees against the revenue. We love football at ABC. It's been a love affair for 36 years. It will go down in the history of sports television, being created on ABC and with this magnificent run. But at this point, given the success we're having with our entertainment product and the financials, we deemed that this was the proper move for us. We're not looking back .”

“Whereas Absurdism in Europe seemed a logical, almost inevitable response to the irrationality of war, the analogous elements that surfaced in American drama seemed more a response to a materialist society run amok. The American-style Absurdism seemed to spring full-blown out of television advertisements and situation comedies, which had become new myth-making machines.”

“We're so screwed up with our principles. We used to mock Japanese game shows where they ate bugs. Now we're doing the same, if not worse. It's terrifying... It seems the better the quality, the more you're penalised... There are some very good people in television, but a lot of fools running it. They put fame ahead of talent and think someone from 'EastEnders' will put bums on seats.”

“During the 1970s and 1980s, the popular television soap opera As The World Turns portrayed sunrise during the opening credits and sunset during the closing credits... The soap-opera sunrise showed the sun moving toward the left as it rose rather than to the right. They obviously had gotten a piece of film showing a sunset and played it in reverse... Had they called their local astrophysicists, any one of us might have recommended that if they needed to save money, they could have shown the sunset in a mirror before they showed it running backward.”

“People say that it was degrading for an Olympic champion to run against a horse, but what was I supposed to do? I had four gold medals, but you can't eat four gold medals. There was no television, no big advertising, no endorsements then. Not for a black man, anyway.”

“Today, National Geographic has a membership side with a magazine and some television side, and they generate about a billion dollars in revenue, and they're profitable. And so at the end of the year they have some bottom line profit which they can then reinvest, because they're running it as a not-for-profit in charitable endeavors.”

“You can't have Rosie on The View and Elton John packing Mom and Pop in at Caesars Palace and gay people all over television, and then have these politicians run out there with a straight face and say that gay and lesbian relationships are a threat to the family. We are winning in the culture - which is why we'll ultimately win the political war.”

“Human beings, because we're so clever, have removed every single one of those population limiting factors... So nothing controls our increase in numbers except our own wish. Since I first started making television programs, the population of the world has increased three times. That's an extraordinary notion. Can it increase four times? Can it increase five times? The Earth is a finite size. So a point will eventually come when we run out of food, when we run out of space and when we will have destroyed most of the natural world. So ought we to do something about it before that happens?”

“It felt really nice to not have anybody talking about numbers, and no one is talking about ratings. From my experience, it felt like there was one person running the ship and it felt like there was space for Jenji to be at the helm. That's not what I've experienced in television before. It felt more akin to an interesting movie, where there were producers who were really excited by the work and wanted to make space for the director's vision to be sort of shared with an audience. It felt more cohesive.”

“We're so conditioned to the syntax of the camera that we don't realize that we are running on only half the visual alphabet... It's what we see every day in the magazines, on billboards and even on television. All those images are being produced basically the same way, through a lens and a camera. I'm saying there are many, many other ways to produce photographic imagery, and I would imagine that a lot of them have yet to be explored.”