Quotes About Television

I think theater is very much my natural home. But the truth is that the older I've got, and the more I've written film and television, I find it incredibly hard to write theater.

I've written six seasons of a TV show with great help from an incredible staff of writers and other collaborators, but I still feel like I don't know what I'm doing. I've kind of freed myself of the expectation that I ever will.

I think most people, almost 96 percent, remember me as Catwoman on the 'Batman' television series. It is a part I will always be grateful for, because it was one of the great parts ever written for a woman. She was sexy, sassy and successful. I played many things, but that is what I will probably be best remembered as.

I'm a talk-show junkie. I'd rather listen to real folks stumbling to express their own thoughts than to polished puppets reading what others have written.

I have never, for a single moment, been aware of pressure from anyone in television about how I dress, what my shape is or how I speak. I've always written my own scripts. I've always been the first to point out that I need to be fit. I need to look good.

So no one should rely on television either for their knowledge of music or for news. There's just more going on. It's an adjunct to the written word, which I think is still the most important thing.

When television gets in trouble is when it forgets that it all begins with the written word.

We're not ashamed of the old stuff, but when you look back at the posters it does make you think: 'My God, six men and one woman.' Weirdly we didn't say 'that's wrong' and no one else did, either. It's been a really quick shift in the landscape of telly, which is brilliant.

But television, when I was doing it, was all about scoring. You had to make these jokes bang, do whatever you could to make the material really pop. And if it didn't, there was something wrong with the material, or with you.

The learning curve on soaps is through the roof because it's a three-camera setup. There's a master and then there's two singles. And the great thing about soaps, and soap actors will tell you, is that when you get your line wrong, they don't re-shoot it. They just cut to the person listening.

There's so many things that can go wrong in the execution of a project like a television show or a movie, so many little elements, any number of things, all the way to marketing - like they could market it poorly and nobody finds it and down it goes.

I don't treat my family any differently because they're on television. I've always had a problem grasping fame. I don't think I understand fame, and I don't think I ever will. I think that anybody who thinks that they understand fame, they're doing it for the wrong reasons.

In terms of representation, television is reflecting an era that has passed. It's the wrong time; it's the wrong period. In all sorts of television, it doesn't feel like the 21st century.

I wrote for 'King of the Hill' for three seasons.

At 'SNL,' I wrote political stuff, but I never felt the show should have an axe to grind. But when I left in '95, I could let my own beliefs out.

I wrote on a show called Johnny Bravo when I was at Hanna-Barbera.

'Game of Thrones' is the broadest of narratives. I don't know if anyone in the U.S. has done a story on such a large scale before, both in terms of what George R.R. Martin wrote and what's on the show.

I wrote on the fourth season of 'Arrested Development.'

I wrote a few unsuccessful screenplays before I wrote 'Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.' I wrote them as television plays that never got made. I'm glad I wrote them - I think it was a good experience.

I grew up in a time where on things like 'The Red Skeleton Show' or even to a certain extent on 'The Carol Burnett Show,' people wrote in the breakouts or ad-libs. They were scripted to look spontaneous. So I always had a dislike of that kind of thing.

I wrote my own play, 'The Westie Monologues,' about where I'm from in Australia, and it was very successful. From that, I started getting offers from television.

I still run into people in the business who skip over any other credits I have and say, 'I loved 'Hey, Dude!' This was back in '88, '89, '90. It was a goofy show about kids working at a dude ranch in Arizona. We did 65 episodes; I wrote 13 of them. We didn't know what we were doing, but it was writers' boot camp. It was great.

'The Dick Van Dyke Show' was my labor of love. When asked the best thing I ever did - that was it. I wrote it originally for myself.

The worst storyline I've ever been involved in I wasn't involved in, because I was clever enough to get pregnant with my second child and they wrote me out and they replaced me with Christine Jones. And thank God - that was the worst storyline.