Quotes About Television

When you watch television, you never see people watching television. We love television because it brings us a world in which television does not exist.

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.

So why do people keep on watching? The answer, by now, should be perfectly obvious: we love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist. In fact, deep in their hearts, this is what the spuds crave most: a rich, new, participatory life.

I grew up with television. I love television and to be working in it is awesome. I think where I do well at television is because I grew up watching the great sitcom actors Jackie Gleason, I love Rob Reiner, also John Ritter.

I did a good bit of episodic television directing, but directing a movie is so much more complicated. And there's so much more responsibility because the medium is very much a director's medium. Television is much more of a producer's writer's medium so a lot of the time when you're directing a television show they have a color palette on set or a visual style and dynamic that's already been predetermined and you just kind of have to follow the rules.

I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book. ANOTHER VERSION I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book. ANOTHER VERSION I find television very educational. Every time someone turns it on, I go in the other room and read a book.

I think I entered the market around the time when there was getting to be less snobbery about the difference between feature films and television. I think there's been a lot more receptivity on television to interesting adult stories that in the '60s and '70s would have been made into feature films. I have no problem jumping back and forth. If anything, I find it less restrictive working in television.

To harness the power of television for the education of our nation's children, everyone must get involved - television programmers, government leaders, teachers, and above all, parents.

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.

I think somewhere in the '90s, it started to shift, and you started to see a lot of film and television actors doing theater, and producers using the notoriety of the film and television actors to sell tickets.

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

I recently realized that Television has influenced a lot of English bands. Echo and the Bunnymen, U2, Teardrop Explodes - it's obvious what they've listened to and what they're going for. When I was sixteen I listened to Yardbirds records and thought, "God, this is great." It's gratifying to think that people listened to Television albums and felt the same.

I absolutely love television, and I don't mean to be vulgar, but as I keep having to explain to people from the movie industry, I get more power and more money doing television, so why on earth would I do a film?

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.

Michael Bay and his team are experts in exciting tentpole-type film and television, and the combination of their film experience plus the great television writers that have come on will be really successful in bringing us something really unique. We are looking to put on these big canvas shows, and Black Sails is going to fit into that. The scripts have been terrific. Everything that we are trying to do is incredibly ambitious, and this is certainly in that category.

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.

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.

We now live in an amazing digital world, and television is firmly part of that brave new world. Television is still the way to reach the most citizens and talk to them – and with them - about how the EU affects their lives. It's still the way to bring people together – to laugh, to debate, to learn. In a world that takes a faster and faster pace, it is nice to know you can slow down once in a while with a good TV programme.

You can always spot a 'television personality', even when they aren't actually on television, because they carry their 'made-up' persona in front of them, like some sort of baffler, or Ready Brek force field. Their reach for notoriety predicated on that fulsome mediocrity of talent detailed above has become frozen in their faces.

My favorite television show of all time is 'Hill Street Blues.' I think it's the show that is to television what Pele was to football or Muhammad Ali was to boxing.

I think you know, to not open your mind to television is silly because there's so much good work happening on television.

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.

We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.

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.

Television exposes the world to the accident. The world is exposed to accidents through television.

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

At network television you could make a show like Freaks and Geeks, and even though 7 million people watch is every week, you were considered a terrible failure, and they got rid of you and staff. Now ... It's like a world where the replacements are the biggest fans in the world. It's, the Elvis Costellos of television are the winners. Creativity is king and it's very very exciting.

My job as a television anchor or television reporter is not to proselytize.

The more opportunities people have to experience television on different platforms, the more television they consume overall. So there actually has been a benefit, but the ratings have gone down. But we've seen kind of the horizontal benefit of this. And it remains a great, great promotion engine.

If your working television sits on top of your non-working television, you might be a redneck.

It's magical thinking to imagine that the reason unspeakable things are being perpetrated by younger and younger people is that they've fallen under the influence of seductive, lascivious, prurient, and violent material in books, films, television. A great deal of this type of censorship has to do with absolving parents of responsibility - parents who just plop their kids in front of the television and leave them there hour upon hour.

I knew I wanted to be an actor when I was very young. I guess I was about 6 years old at the time, and I was fascinated by television. I started having waking fantasies where I was in a movie and there were crane shots of me during a scene.

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

Formula One gives a platform to companies like Rolex - and that's just in media space, watching television or reading newspapers, digital or physical. You see the brand in the context of the competition and bring it to the attention of everybody on a regular basis.

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

I think that comes with a collaboration with the writers. I think that we get cast in edgier roles because we are a little more offbeat, so people - as we get to know the writers, and as the writers get to know us, they start to write around us more, and that's why I think the pilot is not always the best way to get to experience a new television show, because we're fitting ourselves into these characters. Whereas as the show evolves, they're writing the characters for us and for our strengths and weaknesses.

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.

A bad play folds and is forgotten, but in pictures we don't bury our dead. When you think it's out of your system, your daughter sees it on television and says, My father is an idiot.

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.

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.

The reason I live in America is because I mean literally every six or seven years I've done something in England. The last lead I had in an English film I did was 1998. So that's why I live here. It's because I get more work. I'll travel back for radio, you know what I mean. I've just got to consider myself to be living in the middle of the ocean, and that way I have a really nice career, if I'm prepared to do television, radio, theater, and film.

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.

Instead, I watch myself get shot on television.

I don't think any industry was ever as closely scrutinized and written about and constantly in the public eye as television.

My favorite part about costume designing is the artistry of the job. You meet with a director and a visionary to discuss ideas. You research the characters and figure out the components of their look through your own vision. You create a color palette for a film, television or stage medium and discuss it with the director of photography who then lights your colored subjects.

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.

If you want good sketches, go pick up Sid Caesar. The best of Your Show of Shows. That's the greatest sketch comedy you'll ever see on television.