Quotes About Television

I abhor television. Notice how i said ‘television’ and not ‘TV’ because TV is a nickname and nicknames are for friends and television is no friend of mine.

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.

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.

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.

Often times people complain about the lack of time in television, but I have to say, you don't have any more time to film in feature films then you do in television. It's just a question of how many scenes you'll be doing in the course of a day.

I think television scripts have become really intriguing and well-done. And writers have stopped drawing any actual line between film and television they used to never cross.

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 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.

I think I'm better wired for television. I love variety as far as a project. I'm easily bored and the schedule of a television show, it just keeps you going.

I think it always makes for great television when two characters actually take time to realize that they want to be with each other. You have to leave it to the writers to know what makes great television.

What's better these days, television or film? It's a dead heat. In fact, one could argue for television with more regularity.

Film and television are just different. Film is cool because its a complete package. You know the beginning, middle, and end. You can plan it out more, which I like. But with television you get a new script every week, so its constantly a mystery as to what youre going to be doing.

Rather than lose the public because television is here, wouldn't it be smart to adopt television as our instrument?

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?

To move from a discussion of the early relationship between theatre and television to an examination of the current situation of live performance is to confront the irony that whereas television initially sought to replicate and, implicitly, to replace live theatre, live performance itself has developed since that time toward the replication of the discourse of mediatization.

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.

I got into television criticism because I thought it would be easier than film criticism. Film, you had to know 100 years of history, and TV you only had to know 40 when I started. And I thought, "Well, that's going to be so much easier." But film stayed pretty much the same. And television has changed so many times that my head hurts. So I made the wrong call there.

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.

I hope you are reading to your children, out loud. That's much better than watching television, much better. They won't get very much out of television except some bad thoughts.

Sometimes I think on television, you use maybe a tenth of what you are able to do. So it’s nice to go, Well, I’m gonna take two months and reinvest in acting and storytelling. You don’t get to do that on television.

I have no television to go on so I get a lot of writing done. That's my substitute for television.

I should watch network television, or daytime television, because I'm not sure who all these people are who keep getting referred to in blogs and newspapers. I better get myself culturally attuned.

I really enjoy doing films, but I also love television. I certainly would not be against doing some regular television work and being on a show that runs several years.

I was a massive fan of 'Twin Peaks.' Massive. I don't know how any of us grew up in this age of television and weren't astounded, and saying that, I'm still shocked that that was on network television.

If watching television doesn't hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for television so shamelessly sentimentalizes and romanticizes death that it makes the living feel they have missed something - just by staying alive.

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.

I think it's become fashionable for the snobbish egghead today to make fun of television. I've heard many people, boast, "I would never have a television set in my house," well, these people are fools.

One of the great things about the old days of television, 10 years ago, or 15 years ago, was that it was water cooler television. People would communally watch the same hour. People used to tell us all the time, we turn off the phones, we put the kids to bed and that one hour is uninterrupted. Then, the next day at the water cooler, they all talk about it.

As the age of television progresses the Reagans will be the rule, not the exception. To be perfect for television is all a President has to be these days.

I've heard - when I first started, people were saying, "You know if it ends up being Trump against [Hillary] Clinton, it's going to be the highest-rated debate in the history of television - or, show in the history of television. And they also said something else. It'll probably be the greatest voter turnout in the history of this country. That could very well be.

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.

Once in a while a good opportunity would come along, like the first 'Playhouse 90 ever to air - working in television afforded me my best opportunities. The (film) industry was going through such turmoil at the time - studios didn't know where to go anymore, they were falling apart, television was there. They didn't know what kind of films people wanted. The European films were making a huge impact because those films wanted real people in real situations.

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

Television is certainly a writers-led medium. They're the ones who are there, they're the ones that are conferencing or whatever, with directors coming and going.

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

Television was not intended to make human beings vacuous, but it is an emanation of their vacuity.

I don't believe terror and horror are just vicarious pleasures. I think it routes itself in your mind. It can affect your mind. Look at what's going on in the America today. The violence is just awful and I think a lot of has to do with what they are showing on the movies and television.

There really is no foolproof or even optimal way of dealing with White House emissaries who tell whoppers on live television. On the one hand, there's value in hearing what our government has to say about its actions and vision for the future. On the other, news organizations are responsible for the factual hygiene of their product. In some cases, those two imperatives just aren't compatible.

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.

I have no regrets about not having children. I still wait for the pang of guilt, but I have none. I tune into the television show Nanny 911 occasionally which reminds me how much patience and love it take to be a good parent.

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.

I think women are amazing and womens friendships are like a sisterhood and we should see more of it in television and film.

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.

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.

The fact that we don't' talk about it, that we don't have a politics in which this question of war and peace can even get onto the table, so that we can open up our Orwell, our 1984, or Animal Farm, or whatever, and read the political text that's being spotted to us on the television right off of the page; the fact that we don't have a politics robust enough to actually debate whether or not we want to be a country permanently at war. That's what keeps me from sleeping at night.

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.