Quotes About Television

The good television of today is probably better than the best television of the old days. The bad television of today is worse. It is not only bad - it is damaging, meretricious, seedy and cynical.

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.

Television is the same as the telephone, and the same as the World Wide Web for that matter. People who become obsessed by the peculiarities of these communications media have simply failed to adjust to the shock of the old. People who bleat on about the 'artistic' potential of television qua television are equally deluded.

When television came roaring in after the war (World War II) they did a little school survey asking children which they preferred and why - television or radio. And there was this 7-year-old boy who said he preferred radio "because the pictures were better.

One thing that is very different technically is that you don't get a lot of coverage in television. Not like you do on a film. I know we don't have time for separate set-ups, so I will design a scene where I'm hiding multiple cameras within that set-up. That way, if I don't have time to do five set-ups, I can do four cameras in one set-up. It's a different kind of approach for that. For the most part, a lot of television, in a visual sense, lacks time for the atmosphere and putting you in a place.

The 1990 'Goodwill Games' can be another indication that the television world is not divided between commercial and cable. If the viewer thinks highly of our efforts... they will have a higher opinion of cable television and TBS.

I've done great theatre, great films and had a lot of opportunities in television. I also love to sing, and I've been able to do that once or twice in the television shows.

There is no doubt that directing television has helped hone my directing skills. What television teaches you is to be efficient and to think on your feet. You have to adhere to strict deadlines and budget constraints.

I started to work in television for three or four years, in 1954. There was one channel of television, black and white. But it could be entertaining and educational. During the evening they showed important plays, opera or Shakespeare's tragedies.

The great thing about adventure, when told correctly, is it is one of the few genres that everybody in the family can watch together. Our television has become so targeted, it's so specific that there's literally nothing else on television that grandparents are watching with their grandkids, and they're both entertained.

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.

That makes entertaining television. That is the circus of American Idol . We go for the very, very best and the very, very worst. It's the boring people that we don't want to see on television.

Black people watch more television than anybody else, which makes it legitimate to talk about television. Its anesthetizing effect has been quite real. But that concern isn't new.

I really like working in television and I like exploring a character over a longer period of time, and I like the consistency of television.

It's not brain surgery. It's not nuclear physics. It's television. It's only television.

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.

It's not even that finding laundry pleasurable or delightful should be our goal rather than finding television delightful. It's that both laundry and television can be delightful.

I came to Los Angeles and did auditions for television. I made a terrible mess of most of them and I was quite intimidated. I felt very embarrassed and went back to London. I got British television jobs intermittently between the ages of 23 and 27, but it was very patchy.

I was a fan of the television show as a kid but I wouldn't say that I've followed all the movies or anything like that. But I was a television junkie as a kid.

I hate going to L.A. and dealing with the contempt people have for television and television actors. Its unbelievable the kind of attitude people take toward what is the most exciting medium weve got right now.

If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teach them how to use television.

So there was a constant flow and a thin line there between reality and television and yes, much of what I was experiencing in my real life was also what was going on in the television show to the extent that I had to take writers advice and from the counselors around.

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.

Trust me, the being-dead part is much easier than the dying part. If you can watch much television, then being dead will be a cinch. Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead.

I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision, we shall discover a new and unbearable disturbance of the modern peace, or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television - of that I am quite sure.

I don't think people come to television for spectacle. And I don't really have a lot of fun writing spectacle for television, I'll do that in features.

The crazy thing about television is that you are rarely allowed to grow. You are molded into a character based on some of your strongest traits, and you are forced to stay that way for your entire television life.

The U.S. is telling the Northern Alliance to kill Taliban prisoners. It's totally a breach of all the known conventions of war. Western television networks aren't showing this, but Arab networks are showing how prisoners are being killed and what's being done to them. Instead, we're shown scenes that are deliberately created for the Western media: a few women without the veil, a woman reading the news on Kabul television, and 150 people cheering.

Ratings to me are a little like the Chinese Government. I don't fully understand what makes a rating go. I don't know what makes the American television audience respond to one person and not t another. There very seldom are great differences between many television personalities.

It's funny, 90 percent of what I've done has been television, and I never really wanted to do it that much. I was really interested in film and theater. What's ironic is that when I started doing television, I did a bunch of amazing shows all in a row, starting with The Corner.

Local television news, on both radio and television, is so appalling. Makes print journalism look like the greatest stuff ever written.

The Bush campaign for re-election has officially begun. They're actually running television commercials. Have you seen any of the television commercials? In one of the commercials, you see George Bush for thirty seconds. In another commercial, you get to see George Bush for sixty seconds - kind of like his stint in the National Guard.

Television and radio are what I call sequential media; they're not simultaneous media. With simultaneous media, you can scan your eye down an electronic or print page and pick among six or seven stories you might like and want to read. With television and radio, you have to wait until the guy's finished talking about the balloon boy, which I don't have the slightest interest in, to find out that all hell's broken loose in Baghdad. Because they've chosen that day to start with the balloon boy.

In television, the creator is really the voice...

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

I don't like to watch golf on television because I can't stand people who whisper.

The charm of television entertainment is its ability to bridge the chasm between dinner and bedtime without mental distraction.

Television has changed the American child from an irresistable force to an immovable object.

I had no expectation of the level of adulation that would come my way. I just wanted to make a living with a regular role in a television series.

We wanted to prove that I am not just a provocateur, as the television said [referring to a Fox news clip shown in the film]. It's challenging, but it's not just challenging.

People have been predicting the death of television for 20 years now, and so far it's been entirely wrong. But it does seem viewership habits are starting to change.

One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of the three is a rather bizarre and demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles.

I think there's a lot of really good programming on television. What I've noticed, through the years of being a professional writer, is the watering down process of story. You have to market to the masses and not offend anybody.

Instead, I watch myself get shot on television.

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.

What's really important in life? Sitting on a beach? Looking at television eight hours a day? I think we have to appreciate that we're alive for only a limited period of time, and we'll spend most of our lives working.

Well, I really want to encourage a kind of fantasy, a kind of magic. I love the term magic realism, whoever invented it – I do actually like it because it says certain things. It's about expanding how you see the world. I think we live in an age where we're just hammered, hammered to think this is what the world is. Television's saying, everything's saying 'That's the world.' And it's not the world. The world is a million possible things.

I attributed their behavior to the fact that they didn't have a TV, but television didn't teach you everything. Asking for candy on Halloween was called trick-or-treating, but asking for candy on November first was called begging, and it made people uncomfortable. This was one of the things you were supposed to learn simply by being alive, and it angered me that the Tomkeys did not understand it.