John Landgraf Quotes

I don't underestimate audiences' intelligence. Audiences are much brighter than media gives them credit for. When people went to a movie once a week in the 1930s and that was their only exposure to media, you were required to do a different grammar.

Television is a medium because anything well done is rare.

If people are going to watch TV, let's give them something coherent with actual dialogue.

Television is a powerful medium that has to be used for something better than sitcoms and police shows. On the other hand, if you don't recognize the forces that play on what people watch and what they don't then you're a fool and you should be in a different business.

If you make compelling television, they will come.

Sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit-and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you—and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.

That's the power of television. You come into people's homes every week, and that creates a familiarity and a false sense of intimacy.

TV is really about keeping things fresh and making sure you have the most energy possible for these very short spurts of time.

I don't like movies, TV shows, or books or anything that's preaching to the audience or speaking down to us.

You know, it's a big version of an episode, which I think is necessary at this point because we're drawing in people who not only people who have seen the show before and are devoted to it, but people who have never seen it before.

Television is a golden goose that lays scrambled eggs; and it is futile and probably fatal to beat it for not laying caviar. Anyway, more people like scrambled eggs than caviar.

Pretty soon we will no longer have movies. We will have television series only.

The BBC must never be all about ratings - or even mainly about ratings. In the past year, we have made a raft of terrific programmes which stand comparison with the best the BBC has ever done: 'Blue Planet,' 'Walking with Beasts,' 'Son of God,' 'Clocking Off,' 'The Way We Live Now,' 'Conspiracy,' 'Lost World.'

The better the coverage, the more discriminating the viewer.

We are increasingly offered a diet in which sensation, not story, is king.

It's a strange thing to have a successful television show because if it's too interesting... people don't really pay attention when they watch TV. It has to be good, but not so interesting that you really have to pay attention because people multitask. So, if a show demands your entire attention, it has a tough time making it.

I like TV. It all depends what it is.

If you read a lot of books, you're considered well-read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you're not considered well-viewed.

There's not a lot of light on television.

Basically the children who watch it just see the little characters they love, and so they're not discerning about whether it looks great or it's a great story or anything.

I think people really appreciate clever commercials, as do I. I think they're very entertaining. You just have to wade through all the garbage. That's one of the reasons people watch the Super Bowl. A lot of them watch it to see the commercials and not the actual game.

For me, personally, I watch pretty much everything on Netflix, and I watch all the episodes in a row, when I can.

Again, one of the problems I have with television, as I mentioned before, is it's trivial in many ways, and I think that a lot of folks out there are looking for new metaphors and new ways of thinking about things.

I think it's really important to have good quality drama on TV.

A lot of times, us within the industry, we can put this bubble around ourselves and create what a show is supposed to look like and sound like, and we're seeing so much content. The best compliment is, 'I finally found something to watch with my family,' or, 'This is how I really feel, and I can't believe they're showing this on television.'