Quotes About Television

I wouldn't be interested in [nowadays] television simply because I think it goes too fast. Except if something was maybe a play on television or some great television script.

Everyone always says to me, 'Why aren't there more people of color on television?' I'm like, 'Why don't you ask a bunch of people who aren't putting people of color on television why there aren't more people of color on television?'

I may have disparaged the idea that people are looking at films on smaller and smaller screens... it's a shame that people have to watch DVDs with the lights on in a television-type situation where people are wandering in and out of the room. Movies are different from television, and you cannot watch movies like television. It distorts it.

I think everything keeps changing. There was a time when television was a bad thing for actors and it meant that you could only do television, and now we see everyone does television.

It is no accident that television has been dominated by a handful of corporate powers. Neither is it accidental that television has been used to re-create human beings into a new form that matches the artificial, commercial environment. A conspiracy of technological and economic factors made this inevitable and continue to.

Somewhere around the turn of the century, it stopped being hip to say you never watched TV. Adults are much more likely to find something to engage them on television than they are at the local multiplex. Edges are being cut on television all the time, but at the movies only now and then.

When I first started acting, I had all these ideals about the kinds of roles I wanted to play, but the reality is that when you do television - and I do a lot of television - you get cast for qualities that you have as a person. So I look for qualities that I like to portray.

Children from the age of five to ten should watch more television. Television depicts adults as rotten SOB's given to fistfights, gunplay, and other mayhem. Kids who believe this about grownups aren't likely to argue about bedtime.

In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury raised cautions against mass media, especially the television, which dumb down human sensibilities and coerce everybody's thoughts into a single uniform value, allowing human to forget the fundamental action of "having one's opinion". As a result, the society deteriorates. I decided to exhibit [Edward] Kienholz's work which features television as its subject, as well as the Big Double Cross as works that represent this warning.

Television is so cool. Television is proving that we can be sophisticated and that people will watch, if it's good.

I think it's impossible for any of us not to find television, and the political process at its best on television, compelling.

I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed.

I'm still going to do television. I'm just not going to do morning television. I would like to do some things that satisfy interests, private interests.

I saw him playing on television and was struck by his technique, so I asked my wife to come look at him. Now I never saw myself play, but I felt that this player is playing with a style similar to mine, and she looked at him on Television and said yes, there is a similarity between the two...his compactness, technique, stroke production - it all seemed to gel!

I like television. I still believe that television is the most powerful form of communication on Earth - I just hate what is being done with it.

I never say I work in television, I say I get to work in television.

Television is a constant stream of fact, opinions, lies, moral dilemmas, plots: an infinitely complex and sophisticated torrent of information. How could it not make you cleverer? The only people who ever thought television rotted the brain and made kids dumb were those with a vested interest in other ways of learning, or those who were intellectually insecure, usually about books.

I'd say working on television is much, much tougher than films. But television has a great connect with a live audience, which is a refreshing change for us actors.

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.

I had a bumper sticker on my car for a long time that said, "Kill your television." People helpfully pointed out that I was a total fraud because I was a television writer.

The heightened public clamor resulting from radio and television coverage will inevitably result in prejudice. Trial by television is, therefore, foreign to our system.

It is naive to believe that a steady diet of blatant immorality, played out nightly in our living rooms, has no effect on people. I am always curious when individuals insist that what they watch on television or in movie theaters doesn't affect them. ... Are we really to believe that hours, leading to years, of television viewing will not affect attitudes about everything from family life to appropriate sexual relations?

I find with television, you have to play personality, whereas onstage, everyone talks about "the character," and what you do. It's a very different thing, because stage is much bigger, but on television, for things to come across to the public, I think you have to play a bit of your personality.

Some television programs are made very attractive to young children by presenting short, rapidly moving sequences and ever-changing episodes.... Some experts now argue that slower- paced television fare that allows children time to think about the material is more valuable than the faster-paced programs that merely capture their attention.

You don't really have time to do other than what's written. It's very rigid. Shows have a certain rhythm that nobody wants disturbed. So a lot of that doesn't take place on television, at least the television I was doing at the time when I first started.

I think that cinema and television have nothing in common. There is a breaking point between photography and cinema on the one hand and television and virtual reality on the other hand.

In my early teens, I knew I wanted to do television production. I loved cameras, editing and producing, anything that had to do with television production. My friend had a production studio across town, and we'd go over there at night and shoot and edit. I produced my father's televised service for 17 years.

Sometimes when you have an abundance of time and money, it's less conducive to the creative process. I like the urgency of the television schedule and the television price point. It's fluid. You figure it out on the day, and I love the challenge of problem-solving.

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.

In Halberstram's fun house, television elected John F. Kennedy in 1960 (presumably Richard J. Daley and his precinct captains were at home on election night watching the Cook County ballots being counted on television).

The repeat run of Fawlty Towers (BBC2) drew bigger audiences than ever and deservedly so. Statistical surveys reveal that only the television critic of the Spectator is incapable of seeing the joke, which is that Basil Fawlty has the wrong temperament to be a hotel proprietor, just as some other people have the wrong temperament to be television critics.

And then I went into television; and then television moved from the East Coast to Hollywood.

There's a lot of great stuff on television and that's very appealing to actors who want to work, who do good quality and high quality work. But you're always concerned that the time demands on television will interrupt or interfere with your film work.

Postman is a media analyst and his theory is that television doesn't influence our culture, but that it is our culture and the presidency and anything that relies on television.

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.

We film in front of a live audience, and I was a theater actor before I got into television, so I like that.

I think that every show on television has its place. I think Married With Children or, I don't know, The Nanny... some people want to go home, turn on the TV and be able to iron their clothes or grab a sandwich. Come out and catch a joke and not have to follow the story.

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.

Being on television, playing the same character for many years, for me, I think that would get a little tedious.

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.

Theatre, film and television are all modes of storytelling, and many of us are fortunate enough to move freely among them without feeling that we've 'left' or need to 'go back' to one or the other. In fact, if the theatre is to avoid a brain drain, this kind of fluidity is increasingly necessary.

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 am an unconventional beauty. I grew up in a high school where if you didn't have a nose job and money and if you weren't thin, you weren't cool, popular, beautiful. I was always told that I wasn't pretty enough to be on television.

Because I didn't go to film school, I had a collection of books that were inspiring or taught me how to make movies, shorts with my friends back in Brooklyn, and one of those books was How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime which is Roger's autobiography. After reading that, I realized that oh my God, this guy is behind all my favorite Pam Grier movies. Oh my God, he made the Vincent Price Poe films that ran on television when I was little. He did Grand Theft Auto. He made Death Race 2000.

The notion of making the television - the very thing that we allow into our living room and our kid's bedroom - something that's potentially dangerous, to me, is just so incredibly delicious that I can't tell you.

To be able to actually sit in a theater and watch people get off on anything that I had a part in, is just thrilling. When you work in television, it's an isolating experience. You rarely ever get to watch it with an audience.

Reality TV is set up to make people entertaining. A good person with values and principles is not good television.