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Television Quotes

“People are worse educated than they used to be. Certainly they are not very interested in reading books, as opposed to watching television, movies. They are used to getting things through the eye and the ear. In a small way, literature goes on being written, but few people like it. Once it's bureaucratized by the schoolteachers, the game's up.”

“We attempt to remember our collective American childhood, the way it was, but what we often remember is a combination of real past, pieces reshaped by bitterness and love, and, of course, the video past--the portrayals of family life on such television programs as "Leave it to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best" and all the rest.”

“From a writing standpoint, maybe television is a little more satisfying because it's not all hinging on one thing. You can experiment, week to week, and you can be a little narrower in your scope one week, and then be a little broader the next week. But with film, everything can look the way you want it to look. You can really sculpt the final product. So from a directorial standpoint, film is more satisfying. But, they're both forms of media that I'd like to keep involvement in.”

“I'm still learning. It's all a learning curve. Every time you sit down, with any given episode of any given show, it is a learning curve. You're learning something new about how to tell a story. But then, I've felt that way about everything I've ever done - television, features or whatever. Directing or writing, it always feels like the first day of school to me.”

“What serialized cable dramas have given us is the opportunity to not simply tell the same story with slightly different words and different costumes, every week. people are really mining the ability of storytellers to tell a long form story that goes from A to Z, and to trust that an audience will follow that. If they miss it, over the course of the week, they can watch it online or buy the DVD. There are so many different ways of interacting with it. Storytelling in television is getting more complex and more nuanced.”

“Every day on the set, things change. You move things around. The actors are creating the roles and bringing them to life, and bringing the moments to life, as they happen. That's the best thing about television. I think it gets misunderstood, when there's one credit that says, "Written by," because that's certainly not the way it happens, in real life.”

“The only way I'd want to do something in television would be if it was about how I think as a comedian. I'd need to be able to be a creator. That's what I enjoy - I enjoy coming up with comedy, so it'd be very difficult for me to be sitting in a room and have somebody come in and say, "Here's your script! Learn these lines!" That's not fun. At least not for me.”

“I traveled and worked with amazing actors, like Andy Garcia, Alec Baldwin, Brendan Fraser, Forest Whitaker, Lee Pace. It was this great learning experience. And then, I started watching a lot of television. I was always in these foreign countries and I would get TV shows on DVD, and I started to realize that all of the amazing roles for women were on television. I was spoiled by Buffy because I thought that was the way it was everywhere, and it's not.”

“The tough decisions that a president has to make in the Oval Office are in no way related to the capability of a person to do well on television. On the other hand, the capability of a person to project favorably on television enhances that person's odds of being elected so he can serve in the Oval Office. So you can't ignore the talents, one, to be very effective on television, and on the other hand, to be very effective as an operating president.”

“Books can create a depth of story, a background of information and ideas, that televison and movies can't. Sure, the television shows may shock, but only on a superficial level. They'd never risk market share to really explore the issues. They report, but don't analyze or suggest any new ways for living our lives.”

“It's impossible to overvalue the importance of television - both in its serious and less serious functions. It's one of our most important ways of finding out the truth - and also of changing the world, and finding out what in the world needs changing. It's also an immense bringer of joy - I learnt how to laugh through television, and now my children and I, every day of every week, share the joy and stupidity of TV shows - they actually make us HAPPY”

“There used to be a huge snobbism between the film industry and the television industry. I produced and acted in my first - well way back - but the first thing that I produced and acted in was Sarah, Plan and Tall. And the only place to go at the time for really quality television was Hallmark Hall of Fame. And think how much television has changed since then.”

“TV is such a success nowadays because it gives back in a way that features can't. If you go to a film, you only get two hours of great storytellers and performers, and you pay top dollar for that. If you're subscribing to premium channels and you're getting all of these amazing TV shows, and you're watching them as you want, where you want, when you want, on what you want, I think that is the "the golden era of TV" in what television shows are offering to audiences. We're giving them a lot more. It's quality.”

“There is so much investment in it of people's labor time that it will never make money. But there are other documentaries that you might make that are sort of on assignment for television that turn around in three to six months. Then the margin can be much be better for you because you're not spending three-and-a-half years on it. So I think if you're doing documentary films, that's sort of the way to look at it.”

“Television is a great job for a writer in the way that movies used to be, way before my time. Back when writers in Hollywood were on staff or under contract at any given studio and you'd write movie scripts and then the movies would get made within a few weeks, such that you could be a working writer in the movie business back in the '30s and '40s and '50s and have a hand in writing five or six movies a year that actually got produced. The only thing remotely like that in the 21st century here in Hollywood is working in the TV business.”

“Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren, so that the message of our principal art forms, movies and television and political speeches and newspaper columns, for the sake of the economy, simply has to be this: War is hell, all right, but the only way a boy can become a man is in a shoot-out of some kind, preferably, but by no means necessarily, on a battlefield.”

“I think that television lately has been extremely dark and, in some ways, cynical but I also think that people who are writing those shows probably feel exactly as I do - that sometimes the darkness of a story can highlight the light in a story. There's a lot of cynical stuff but I think it may be even more in movies now where you see so many movies about cynical and corrupted characters. That's the state of many movies right now but movies, television, all of culture, there's always going to be a battle between the stories that are cynical and stories that are hopeful.”

“I have, over the years brought an enormous number of plays to television starting obviously with Nicholas Nickelby and then things like Angels In America or in Wit with Emma Thompson and Mike Nichols. So, yes, I do find that very interesting and I'm sure that down the road there will be plays that I'll want to do that way.”

“Every time someone does a Western movie, people flock to it. It's like, we're continually programming to people who are least likely to watch us. People in Nebraska aren't watching things on the computer, they're watching television. Why aren't we programming things for them? We only program things that appeal to New York and Los Angeles and in many ways spit on the rest of the country.”

“The way that people are watching TV is changing. The landscape of television is changing. Movies are becoming much more insular. They're like a walled garden, where you know what you're going to see and you expect it. But in the world of TV, because it's episodic, you can explore any area because you have time to do that. You can take risks on the kinds of storytelling that you're doing.”

“I think what people watch television for is the emotional continuity, from episode to episode, and feeling that the experience that they had, four episodes ago, has actually been building to an episode that comes later, and knowing that the characters are growing, as a result of that, and making mistakes, is really, really important to the way people connect to television.”

“Televisison is like a factory line. You need discipline and focus. You have to hit your mark and know your lines. It's not that I don't know my lines when I do a film, but the pace of discovery is always a little bit more relaxed and nurturing and almost babying, in a way. Television toughens you up, and I like that, but I don't want it to toughen me up too much.”

“As a woman in sport media, you have to be smart. You use what you can to your advantage and make sure you know what you're talking about or you're A) not going to last very long or B) never going to get a good job. I think we've come a long way and probably still have a ways to go, but... I just don't take any of this super seriously. I'm not curing cancer and I'm not a doctor. It's just television. I don't know why some people get so worked up about it.”

“There's something I call 'Moving Day,' which I've done for the last 20 years. Look at everything in your home, then think about how you could combine things in a different way. Maybe you break up your night tables and use one in the family room; maybe the dining room sideboard becomes a console table for your television, with storage underneath.”