So the remote control would combine the American male’s two greatest passions: firearms and driving around aimlessly without ever asking for directions. For what is channel surfing but the blind hope that you will, without consulting a guide, somehow stumble upon your destination? --Steve Rushin
For the first time, the barnyard epithet of Nixon White House fame would be heard on a network show. In the “Philly” episode, a scrappy defense attorney who has been put in jail for a few hours is told by a fellow-prisoner that one of her clients killed a man. “Bullshit!” she says. “Bullshit?” the prisoner replies. “I saw it happen.” Whereupon the network would cut to a commercial and boils would break out on man and beast; and, after the boils, there would be thunder and hail, and after the hail, swarms of locusts.
That was the plan, anyway.
I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air … and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland. –
There are three rules for creating a hit television show. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.
The real challenge is to have something to say. Do you ever find yourself saying, “the problem with television is that it needs four hundred and twenty-two more horizontal scanning lines?” No. The problem with TV has to do with story. Most stories really suck. People talk about interactive storytelling. Fine. But the reason you pay Steven Spielberg ten million dollars is that he’s better at telling stories than you are. You want him to tell you stories for the same reason you don’t go out and buy a vise grip and do do-it-yourself bypass surgery. –Bran Ferren
TV is a crapshoot masquerading as a business masquerading as an art form.
James Kaplan, puzzling in a recent New York over why his generation is less adulterous than his parents’, came to the arresting conclusion that, raised on television and able to rent videos at will, he and his peers are so fully entertained that it is just too much effort to get to know their neighbors well enough to sleep with them.
In a J.F.K., Jr., George interview of Billy Graham, John asked what Dr. Graham would do differently, if he could do it all over. Graham replied, “I’d watch less tv.”
It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper. –Rod Serling
When it comes to mass media, it’s useless to ask people what they want until they have it. –Chuck Klosterman
Do the show you want to do because in the end, they're going to cancel you anyway. –Writer and producer Ed Weinberger
My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too. –Peter De Vries
