Quotes About Television

I've really dreamed of doing television. All of us do television, coming up. But when I was coming up, television was a black hole for actors. Now, television has a certain cache. Now everybody wants to be on TV because they're doing adult dramas. If you're an actor, it's like, "Well, get me on television," because it's the only place you can do it and also make a living at it. If my kids need shoes, I better do a TV show because I damn sure don't make any money with independent films.

Television is competitive now, and the great stories live on television right now. I'm finding that I'm enjoying television more than film, these days. That was my motivation to take a TV show.

My fantasy for children's television is that it's not really children's television, it's everybody's television.

I would really like to focus on directing features, and then eventually take that skill set back to television. On features, you have more control. On television, the producers are the creative forces behind it. Directors come and go on television.

Television is just the wrong medium, at least in prime time, to teach science. I think it is hopeless if it insists on behaving like television. . . .

All television is children's television.

When I look at my career, the bulk of it has been television, and I love working in television. But there's a speed at which you do it. You're doing seven to ten pages a day on a series, and it's hard to feel like you're doing the detail-oriented work that I like to do.

Television is not the truth. Television is a goddamned amusement park.

Television is all about sound. You'll never get a moment of silence unless there's something really extraordinary going on, on screen, visually. They never let a moment of silence pass without being filled in television because it's a very sound-driven medium.

They dislike me, the liberal media dislikes me. I was always the best at what I did, I went to the Wharton School of Finance, did well. I went out, I started in Brooklyn office with my father, I became one of the most successful real estate developers, one of the most successful business people. I created maybe the greatest brand. I then go into, in addition to that, part time, like five percent a week, I open up a television show. The Apprentice on many evenings was the number one show on all of television, a tremendous success.

You could do much more in movies than you could on TV, and even movies were heavily censored. But in television, the areas of timorousness were fairly laid out. Race relations. Sex. Politics. There was a whole conglomeration of taboo themes. And even to date, though television has become a much freer medium, it's still far less free, far less creatively untrammeled than are the movies. They're infinitely more adult in that respect.

Everything you look at now, the scripts that come in that you look at, the television scripts are way better than the movie script. The talent is going to television.

I've noticed a lot of people talking about the wealth of roles for powerful women in television lately. And when I look around the room at the women here and I think about the performances that I've watched this year, what I see actually are women who are sometimes powerful and sometimes not. Sometimes sexy and sometimes not. Sometimes honourable and sometimes not. And what I think is new is the wealth of roles for actual women in television and in film. That's what I think is revolutionary and evolutionary and it's what turning me on.

To me, television is one of the most exciting things going on right now, as far as content goes. Some of these shows that are on television are better than any of the movies out there.

Radio did not kill books and television did not kill radio or movies - what television did kill was cinema newsreel. TV does it much better because it can deliver it instantly. Who wants last week's news?

Jeff always says, "In the cinema, everybody goes to sci-fi. Those are the biggest movies. But, in television, nobody wants to touch it with a barge pole." It's strange. I think it's because maybe there's a legacy of television shows that depicted sci-fi in a certain way that turns off a lot of viewers, so maybe there's a negative connotation.

In modern society most of us don't want to be in touch with ourselves; we want to be in touch with other things like religion, sports, politics, a book - we want to forget ourselves. Anytime we have leisure, we want to invite something else to enter us, opening ourselves to the television and telling the television to come and colonize us.

In my early thirties I was working in television as a researcher. I was really stuck for a period of five years. I got to TV when I was thirty. I hated being a music writer, and kept wondering why I couldn't be doing the exciting things that my friends were doing in television.

It takes a pretty strong person, a rather unusual young person, to stand up to ridicule and refuse to give in to temptation. There are so many things today in modern music, on television, and in the movies that portray a life that is nowhere near the life the Lord would have us live. Consequently, we cannot afford to turn to the radio, television, or Hollywood to take our cues about what is right and what is wrong. It is scary to realize that the more we are exposed to Hollywood's version of life, the more we gradually begin to accept it.

I think I've actually benefited from Australia being a kind of combination of both British and American culture. We kind of got the best of both British and American television and books, science fiction and fantasy, and so on. So I'm familiar with a lot of, for example, American books and television that a British author of my generation might not be.

There's so little difference between television and features as far as you make the film. I mean, you have less money and it's a little quicker, but the concept is all on television.

American movie audiences now just don’t seem to be very interested in any kind of ambiguity or any kind of real complexity of character or narrative - I’m talking in large numbers, there are always some, but enough to make hits out of movies that have those qualities. I think those qualities are now being seen on television and that people who want to see stories that have those kinds of qualities are watching television.

I had never thought of doing television. But my agent wanted me to meet John Wells, who had had a lot of success producing ER and China Beach. The night before the meeting, some friends were over for dinner and Akiva Goldsman and I slipped downstairs to the basement so we could sneak a cigarette. He said, "You know what would make a good television series? That." And he was pointing at The American President poster. He said, "There doesn't have to be a romance, just focus on a senior staffer."

Now, all America sits in front of television sets and those television sets exude, I am sorry to say, a considerable amount of radioactive material. It's not huge, you know, but it's enough so that people who have made a habit of watching TV ... get the TV radiation.

What little reality television I've seen seems to be about economic desperation. Like the marathon dancing of the Great Depression, which should give us pause. People willing to eat flies and worms for a sum that is less than the weekly paycheck of the show's producer. I haven't seen "reality television" that is other than this kind of painful, sadistic exploitation of fit young people looking for agents.

I don't watch much television. My old TV agent used to always get mad at me because he'd send me out on auditions and I'd be like, 'What's this show?' and he'd be like, 'It's literally the top show on television.' I wasn't allowed to watch TV as a kid.

In a sense, terrorism blossomed in the advent of television. Television promotes terrorism in religion and in politics.

Now, you always know there's going to be some compromise when you're doing something for television, and especially network television.

I love making movies, I love the differentness of it, I love writing. But I've always liked television. I grew up on television.

TV can be an acronym for television or transvestite. I prefer using it to describe the the latter. The former is strange and undignified.

Choosing how you vote should not be a snap verdict based on a few minutes of television.

Working in theater, film or television are three different jobs for an actor, and I accept them as such.

Somehow, by just continually pestering the general public by appearing on television, they accepted me and wanted more.

There was a time when the FCC tried to require a certain amount of television and media to be educational, a certain amount to be newsworthy and a certain amount of it to be public access.

Lives with no more sense of spiritual meaning than that provided by shopping malls, ordinary television, and stagnant workplaces are barren lives indeed. Spirituality enriches culture.

I was fortunate to be part of a very successful show on CBS in 1986. I switched to NBC for eight years and through these experiences have gotten terrific insight into television; it's a fascinating medium.

I love to perform and I love to perform characters, and sometimes when I'm doing television and film, I just feel like I'm making a living. I'm good at it, but I'm not really being artistically challenged.

I think we have got to start again and go right back to first principles. The argument I shall advance, surprising as it may seem coming from the author of the earlier chapters, is that, for an understanding of the evolution of modern man, we must begin by throwing out the gene as the sole basis of our ideas on evolution. If there is only one Creator who made the tiger and the lamb, the cheetah and the gazelle, what is He playing at? Is he a sadist who enjoys spectator blood sports? ... Is he manuvering to maximize David Attenborough's television ratings?

I would have been a lot more nervous if I would had known that Matthew McConaughey was [on 30th Annual Television Critics Association Awards] and Julia Louis-Dreyfus was there and all that, and I was like, "Wait a minute and Bryan Cranston's here..." I think I would have got more nervous. But I think thinking it was just like, "Oh yeah critics, we're good." It was great.

For my job, I act tough. I'm not tough. On the street, I don't go out beating people up and this and that. I used to joke one time on the television station that I never... Everybody that I beat up deserved it. I never beat up an innocent person.

We did not have a television while I was growing up, and so I read voraciously. My earliest memory of being utterly transfixed by a book was Madeleine L'Engle's 'A Wrinkle in Time.

A lot of the comedians nowadays just do comedy as a stepping stone. Take for example Dane Cook. The guy is huge. The main reason he got into it is to do what he is doing now: film and television work.

Exponential growth in access to the Internet, satellite television and radio, cell phones, and P.D.A.'s means that breaking news now reaches virtually every corner of the globe.

If intelligence were a television set, it would be an early black-and-white model with poor reception, so that much of the picture was gray and the figures on the screen were snowy and indistinct. You could fiddle with the knobs all you wanted, but unless you were careful, what you would see often depended more on what you expected or hoped to see than on what was really there.

One of the reasons that people are so fascinated by Jared Kushner is that he has had no role at all in anything close to politics up to this point I mean much like his father-in-law, and he's just such an unknown figure. I mean at least we knew Donald Trump as a reality television star and as a very bombastic figure. But Jared is so quiet, and he's so uninterested in courting press attention.

Even in the 1960's, look at the minority percent of those kids being raised without a father. It was around 20 percent. America is at 80% today. I think the government is to blame for that. I think the media is to blame for that. I think you have to look at television shows and sitcoms. How do they portray fathers? They are dopey. They are dumb. They are fat. The mom is hot and the kids make fun of dad, and mom makes fun of dad. We have just relegated his role to be sort of the dumpy loser guy. And we need to get that back.

I'm somewhat diffident about cuffing television on its rabbit ears for not being something else.

Is television literally functioning as our conscience, tempting us and rewarding us at the same time?