Quotes About Television

I started out as Keith Mitchell. I had done probably about ten years of television work under that name. Then my grandfather passed away in 1984. I wanted to honor him and his name.

I did six series for the BBC and that was enough. I've been writing for ten years, which is more challenging artistically.

Ten years of being on TV, I'd never taken a sick day.

What happens if you're the guy who's been on the show ten years and is highly paid but they have nothing for you to do is that they bring in other people, and you become a supporting character to those people.

I've learned more about directing from five years of television than I could have in ten years of film.

They haven't had 'The X Factor' in Finland for ten years. But because I was on it and it was such a hit, they decided to bring it back and have me as a judge.

Because I tend to kind of hide under the sheets when it comes to reality television. I've seen probably one episode of maybe five different shows, and that's about it.

One reason we fell in love with television is we've seen so many movies and they tend to follow a very similar pattern.

The occasional motivational speech gig tends to pay better than the books and television.

Television tends to be a more difficult medium for me to get my head around sometimes when it comes to certain things I get offered.

TV tends to try and fit everyone into a TV mold.

There tends to be this hierarchy of film and television, and theater is somewhere else in its own milieu. However, as actors, yes, we love to do theater because it's our story. Nobody can edit it, the curtain goes up, and it's ours for two hours or three, or whatever. And we tell it.

American television tends to move faster than European or U.K. television.

We kind of forget because what television tends to do with these professions like lawyers and doctors and police officers, we create them on such a heroic level that you kind of forget that these are really people.

TV tends to laud the person with the perfect one-liner rather than the one with the better idea.

Theatre tends to be more metaphorical and intense, as you're locked in one room and focused on one thing. Television can hop around, and you need to invest in its naturalistic reality more. But I love writing both, precisely because they're so different.

I like watching tennis and basketball, but it's not every day you can watch it on TV. I don't play them, though.

Networks can typically invest tens of millions of dollars in the development of a pilot. And if they put the show on the air and it fails, that's all lost money. There's no monetization of a broken series.

It annoys me when contemporary films and television shows create artificial tensions that could easily be resolved by a quick email or the use of a search engine. 'La La Land' was guilty of this several times, as well as a more generalised aesthetic nostalgia.

Why should I be feeling tension? It's The Daily Show.

I think that in order for anything to work on television, you have to have conflict. Nothing can be too happy or it's boring. People don't want to watch that - they want to watch things that are exciting and dangerous and sexy and have tension.

I wrote Steve Carell's last episode. I think it was a really good episode, but there's always a tension between what's good for the series and what's good for an episode, because the more closure you put on an episode, the more significant feeling it is.

The tension in pro ball comes from the realization that any game could be your last, that an injury could end your career. And in TV, you never know if or when your series will be canceled.

I didn't even think demographics until I got to ABC. They were the first to go for 18-to-49. But, at CBS, it was just, 'Let's get 'em in the tent.'