Quotes About Television

The internet has surrounded television and turned television into an art form.

See the man on the TV with a phony smile. Bring you up, bring you down, he can turn your head around.

My older brother Joel became an art teacher my brother Rip ultimately became a television producer and singer and actor himself.

On television, journalists now routinely appear on talk-shows-with-an-attitude where they are encouraged to say what they think about something they may not have finished thinking about.

Two things become clear to me. The first is that this is a world where good and evil struggle in all levels of existence. I want to be a force for good. The second thing is that I need to find employment if I want to obtain any more currency. As I'm sure is the case for many earthlings, I find my answer on the television. My martian name is J'onn J'onzz. Here on Earth I shall be known as John Jones. Police detective John Jones. I'll be one of the good guys.

Violence and smut are of course everywhere on the airwaves. You cannot turn on your television without seeing them, although sometimes you have to hunt around.

Another possible source of guidance for teenagers is television, but television's message has always been that the need for truth, wisdom and world peace pales by comparison with the need for a toothpaste that offers whiter teeth *and* fresher breath.

I learned this from a show called Captain Video, featuring a man named, oddly, Captain Video

When I was very young I couldn't watch anything black and white on TV because I knew the people moving were now dust.

1. The Amazing Race 2. I Thought This Show Was Gonna Be About Aryans 3. Oh. (Joe O'Neill, from Opium)

I start thinking about what happened and then I start thinking about why I'm still here. It's pointless. They say on TV that the soldiers want to be there? I can't speak for every soldier, but I think if people went around and made a list of names of who fucking thinks we should actually be here and who wants to be here, ain't nobody that wants to be here, because there's no point. What are we getting out of fucking being here? Nothing.

What TV is extremely good at—and realize that this is all it does—is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it.

I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose the Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

shall I spend much of your time pointing out the degree to which televisual values influence the contemporary mood of jaded weltschmerz, self-mocking materialism, blank indifference, and the delusion that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive?

Statisticians report that television is watched over six hours a day in the average American household. I don't know any fiction writers who live in average American households. I suspect Louise Erdrich might. Actually I have never seen an average American household. Except on TV.

No more Network reluctance to make a program too entertaining for fear its commercials would pale in comparison.

I ara vosaltres sigueu feliços, cagom déu.» ?Paraules televisades, Despatx Oval, Casa Blanca Novembre de 1987

But it is not I the spy who have crept inside television's boundaries. It is vice versa. Television, even the mundane little businesses of its production, has become my—our—own interior. And we seem a jaded, weary, but willing and above all knowledgeable Audience. And this knowledgeability utterly transforms the possibilities and hazards of "creativity" in television.

Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men's tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, watching the young Swiss at play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you're OK.

Tv's "real" agenda is to be "liked," because if you like what you're seeing, you'll stay tuned. tv is completely unabashed about this; it's its sole raison.

Hence also the weird viewer complicity behind TV's sham "breakthrough programs": Joe Briefcase needs that PR-patina of "freshness" and "outrageousness" to quiet his conscience while he goes about getting from television what we've all been trained to want from it: some strangely American, profoundly shallow, and eternally temporary reassurance.

we don't take it seriously enough as both a disseminator and a definer of the cultural atmosphere we breathe and process, that many of us are so blinded by constant exposure that we regard TV the way Reagan's lame F.C.C. chairman Mark Fowler professed to see it in 1981, as "just another appliance, a toaster with pictures.

tends to put us before the television and its one-way window

Television's greatest minute-by-minute appeal is that it engages without demanding. One can rest while undergoing stimulation. Receive without giving.