Quotes About Television

The old Johnny Carson 'Tonight Show' was great in that he was so good with the guests, and it was not about him. I think he was very smart in realizing 'I have plenty of screentime on this show. I do my monologue and we do sketches and stuff like that.' During the interview, he really made it about trying to bring the best thing out of the guest.

You know, back when I was a kid who wanted to be in show business, everybody on TV wore nice clothes. They were very glamorous when they would be on the 'Tonight Show.' All the dudes wore suits and ties and that just seemed like real show business to me.

As I got older, I never considered that tons of people were watching me on television every week. I give a nod to my parents for keeping me as normal as I could be in an un-normal adult world.

The great thing about the beach they use in 'Home & Away' is that they can't kick you off it, so there were always tons of Irish people on it all the time.

There's tons of creative people in television that have one failure after another, and they just step up higher. I could never get over that. When I had a failure, there was no such thing as just getting over it.

I don't get tons of scripts to be looking at and deciding on in terms of feature films; the industry has changed. Fortunately, with television and streaming and original series online, there's this whole new thing that has opened up, which I think is fantastic.

I've done tons of guest spots and in parts where the character invariably dies or is dead.

I grew up in Greeley, Colorado, in a house without a television set. I was a very nerdy kid: I used to play 'astronaut' and eat bouillon as astronaut food. We also had tons of books.

The indie shows are tons of fun. And for the fans, having that up close and personal experience is so different to watching wrestling on television at home.

Yeah, tons... fillers and botox and I've definitely made some mistakes but it's hard to watch yourself get older on television.

Claudia Winkleman is a good laugh and James Corden too.

To be stuck with that Kardashian label, that was so hurtful to me and to my career. I probably realized that too late - not that it would've affected my decisions in terms of who I dated, but it would've affected my decision to appear on the show.

I love doing stand-up. It's so self-contained - you go there, you do it, you go home - but with telly, there are too many people involved with it with opinions. You have a product, and everyone wants to change it.

If you drop a line in the theatre, you can usually find a way round it. But you can't do that as easily on television - you're in the hands of too many people.

There's still too much filler, copycat programming that's out there. We work so hard to pioneer new ideas, and then those ideas are just regurgitated by other networks. That's not good for anybody, I think. That's not good for our business. That's not good for our audience.

If we're talking fantasy, I would love to host a late night talk show... More Fallon than Leno. Those guys always seem like they're having way too much fun at their 'jobs.'

I hired Tina Fey for 'SNL,' which was certainly a good match. She took off right away there.

David Letterman is the best late-night talk show host right now, hands down, and has been since he first took the desk.

With 'Nighty Night' series one, Oprah Winfrey's channel took it on, so she must have liked it.

I took acting classes in college, and once I graduated, I decided to give acting a shot when I couldn't really think of anything else to do. It took me a couple of years to get an agent, and my first big break was The Fanelli Boys, which was a sitcom on NBC. Then I did a few television movies.

When I got off '24,' pretty soon after that I did a movie that took place in the '70s, this movie with Jimmy Caan and Gena Rowlands, and I needed to kind of have that '70s pouffy housewife hair.

MTV made a huge impact. Heavy rotation took you from selling 1m albums to 20m albums, and that meant a lot of dough.

A sitcom isn't usually the right tool for satire.

TV is such a great medium in what it can do in terms of enlightening an audience. We can really inspire and teach people about other people. That's a powerful tool, and that's something that the arts has always been capable of doing.