Quotes About Television

For one year, I want to do this thing where I guest-star on as many television shows as I possibly can. I love television. The fact that television ultimately made me famous was very gratifying for me.

There was a time when I said, "I'm going to go do a television thing," after doing all these theatrical films, and heard, "Television? Why are you going to go back to television?" It's an interesting place.

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.

The challenge with all television - all series television as you get into later seasons to give people what they have come to, what they've become familiar with and what the qualities of the shows that they recognize without letting it get staled.

I grew up in a house full of music, and a house that didn't have a television. We had a piano, but no television. And really, I very quickly realized that this was, you know, there was magic there, there was magic to be had, you could lose yourself in it, it was a refuge, it was joy, it was all of those things.

Television's getting better because people are investing more money and time and respect into it. But the secret weapon of television is that, because it's a slow burn, you get to meditate on things and develop them. As opposed to film, where you have an allotted amount of time and hopefully you can wrap it up in there.

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.

There's a level of action unlike anything else on television. AMC always makes distinctive television and I think that certainly fits that requirement.

I think for television generally, the question that often arises is, "Does television lead, or does it follow?" You know, does it lead the conversation, or culture, or does it follow what's going on? And I think it does both.

Actors always direct themselves. A good actor shows up onset ready, especially in television, and you've done your homework and you know your character. The director may have some variation on what you're thinking or they may have a different interpretation of the scene. So you come prepared to shoot and you've given yourself notes. In television, it may be the first time you're meeting this director and you've been living in this character's skin for a couple of years. It's always great to have fresh perspective and fresh insight, but no one knows your character better than you do.

Most of the time people are aiming so low on television. They're trying to reach that common denominator, especially on network television.

Television was first conceived to be used as some kind of telescope, not for broadcasting. Originally, Sworkin, the inventor of television, wanted to settle cameras on rockets so that it would be possible to watch the sky.

Ultimately, the dollars will have to come from television. Will it come from television tomorrow, I don't know.

And as a character, what I found very inspiring about playing Dharma, especially at that time, is that the women on television were more neurotic than they were free. And I thought, this is a rare bird and this is unique on television and I think it's really refreshing.

We just have to go at 100 miles an hour in all our businesses, be they television broadcasting, be they magazine publishing, be they subscription television, be they online, be they gaming. We just have to go at one hundred miles an hour.

I'm sure in less than 10 years there will be several streaming services or whatever you want to call them that are dedicated to retro television, like rare retro television, and maybe we'll end up doing something with that. Maybe Gigi will find popularity there, because it was fun, it was kitschy and very stupid and very dirty. But it had heart. I hope people will watch it one day.

I am of the opinion that there is more high-quality television being produced than at any time in the history of television.

Watching television requires no skills and develops no skills. That is why there is no such thing as remedial television-watching.

If theres something decent going in television, the mediums now are kind of equal. Television has become much higher quality.

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.

Disparagement of television is second only to watching television as an American pastime.

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.

Somebody said on television, somebody said last night on television: Nobody has gotten rich betting against Donald Trump. That's in my lifetime. That's not just for this election cycle. I went in, and people said: "He's not gonna run." I've gone through this with you.

I got tired of doing battle with people thinking I was a little weird because I wasn't in a band making happy, stilted music. The only people who really seem weird to me are people who think they're normal. People who think it's possible to be normal just by doing the same things that most people do. Is there a most people? I don't know. Television makes it seem like there is, but I think that might just be television.

The advertising marketplace is moving rapidly into digital videos. We know that by 2018 it is estimated that it will be a $12.2 billion business. We've been seeing the agencies combine their digital video spend with television spend and put it under one spend and just calling it "video." The pool of money is becoming much bigger. The comparisons between television and digital video are being made much more often because you can account for who's watching, you can't fast-forward through the commercials. There's a much more intimate relationship with someone watching digital video.

The internet has surrounded television and turned television into an art form.

Nowadays, to be frank, every week is a good week for freakshow television. we might start asking, Why are there so many freaks? And why do they all want to be on television?

Only at the Golden Globes do the beautiful people of film rub shoulders with the rat-faced people in television.

A lot of TV is put together by teams, by writing staffs and several different directors. It's a great, very smart way to make television. It's worked for however long TV's been around.

I'm inordinately proud of Smash, on so many levels. The complexity of producing that show, every week, is just incredible. As a television producer and as a Broadway producer, which I once was, I am in awe of what we can do on that show, every week.

When we graduated [ from Cambridge], we were grabbed right into television. I was grabbed straight into the practice of writing comedy. It was all writing and performing. You wrote something in order for you to perform it.

There's something about the evolution of television where it evolved from to the things that we're now watching and loving. It evolved from film writers, film actors, and I think gradually people are easing themselves into the amount of time they have.

I think the reason the Golden Age of television is so golden is because a lot of folks are willing to let creators do their thing and live or die by their own muse. They certainly allow us to do that.

There was a time when television was sort of frowned upon among people who wanted to be serious artists. John Travolta kind of exploded that. He was one of the actors who made that go away.

That is the godawful thing about television today. Performers don't have any place to hit and miss. You're either in or you're out; you don't have a chance to become good at your craft. If you make three pictures in a row and they don't go over, you're out of the business.

You can't just live in a comfortable little suburban neighborhood and get your education from movies and television and have any perspective on life.

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?

MSNBC has abruptly ended their relationship with Keith Olbermann, and according to his contract he's not allowed back on television for at least six months. Or as industry experts call it, The Conan.

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.

It's very hard to become an actor in film and television, you have to have such perseverance and you have to really believe that if you have any sort of talent at all, you will find work one day.

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.

The films of The Caine Mutiny and Marjorie Morningstar always seemed to me mere thin skims of the story lines, and I never did see a meager Hollywood caper called Youngblood Hawke, vaguely based on my 800-page novel. So it was that I opted for television, with its much broader time limits, for The Winds of War.

The nuclear generator of brain sludge is television.

Because my faith is important to me and then they wrote it in that my character I would be playing would also be a Christian, many people would often assume now that I'm playing myself on television. And I'm not.

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.

Theatre has always been better disposed to colourblind casting than telly or film. Given that most television is contemporary, and it reaches 56 million people, I am disappointed there still isn't more representation.

I'm bullish on writing. Movies, radio, television, and now digital media - everything was supposed to push us away from text, to video or "back" to speech. First, there's no going back. We're always stumbling forward. Second, writing is invincible. Thirty years ago, we thought we'd all be talking to our computers; instead, we're all typing on our phones.

I love to go back and write and direct another film one day, but that's on the backburner for now because I'm involved with so much television at the moment.