Quotes About Television

In television, you are of necessity working in bits and pieces and scenes, and things are out of order, and you never can have the same sense of how will this look when it's all put together, what will the effect be.

Once you put something like 'The A-Team' on the map, it does become part of the DNA of television. People grab little pieces of it. I certainly grabbed little pieces of other people's shows when I was creating my shows.

I love the 'Mildred Pierce' miniseries.

I was never a huge 007 fan, but I sure liked Sean Connery. I'm sure Pierce Brosnan is good and has his moments, but I've not seen him; I've only seen bits and pieces on TV, so I can't really judge. Pierce looks very natural in the role.

I have no great desire to play a great role. You can't make quality on TV anyway. It's always a manure pile. You're on the top, or you're on the bottom, but it's still a manure pile, and I'm not sure the movie industry isn't like that, too.

We're more effective than birth control pills.

Whenever I pick a script, I make sure I'm choosing something I would want to watch. And 'Quantico' was something I'd definitely want to watch. As soon as I read the pilot - and I read 26 this season - I knew this was it.

I can't tell you how good it is to go from 'Homeland' to be lucky enough to find 'The Blacklist' at the right time. It literally came at the very end of pilot season when I thought there was nothing left.

I have this TV pilot I was writing for and a couple of films. It's just a different way to express myself.

I actually worked on the pilot of 'The Chase' and wrote the questions on it.

I don't watch the show - only bits and pieces of all of them. The only one I sat through was the pilot.

You read a million scripts during pilot season, and most of them are not very good, so the good ones really shine.

What they did was to make a pilot and it may well go to series at the next festival but I don't have any news on that. It's already been on Paramount actually, but as it's on Paramount it'll probably be on several more times... hopefully.

I'm shooting a pilot based on my show. It's a one-camera show. I play myself.

When you're doing a pilot, you're doing it in this bubble that almost works against the creative impulse. You don't have time to get to know the actors first, and you have three writers, as opposed to a room full of writers.

More people saw the pilot of 'Glee' than saw me in my entire 10-year career on Broadway.

Before we shot the pilot, I knew what 'Dallas' was, but I actually was too young to remember the details of the show. I didn't have my hands on the DVDs, so I YouTubed everything I could of J.R.

If you go to pilot then you are probably going to go to series. That's my feeling about it.

As actors, if you get a pilot on HBO or on USA, your odds are good that it's going to get picked up.

At the end of the day, it's really, really difficult to make a brand-new show, to write a pilot where you have to introduce characters and everyone has to kind of be dynamic and have something different for themselves.

I remember on the pilot of 'Will and Grace' some executives from NBC saying to me, 'There are too many gay jokes.' I said, 'If not on this show, then what show?'

I started to book good television jobs in 2010. I started to get really close to exceptional jobs in 2011, and then I got 'Arrow' in 2012. I know how lucky I am because just getting the lead in a pilot doesn't guarantee that that pilot is going to turn into something great.

I won't name any names, but I've done a couple of shows where once the pilot got picked up, the creators openly said, 'I have no idea where we're going.'

The pilot of 'Seinfeld' was made and dropped. 'Seinfeld' was not supposed to go to series.