Hal Sparks Quotes

I got overwhelmed by the magnitude of the celebrity culture in America. My background is as a news journalist, and newsrooms in the US are shrinking - investigation teams are being terminated or shrunk on newspapers all around the country. The one aspect that's expanded is coverage of celebrity culture.

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

I don't meet many people who are talking about shows on Showtime.

One of the things about being on Twitter, for me, is mostly about just being on the pulse of what people are interested in, what people are doing and what people are looking for. I look at entertainment projects and storytelling, and I really try to think about what people want.

My feeling for reality TV isn't ironic, guilty, or apologetic. Reality TV is one of the few remaining modes of popular entertainment in which characterization is permitted as plot.

When a television show like 'Scandal' becomes the biggest show in recent history, suddenly advertisers and networks want to jump on that. And what it's showing is that people want to see diversity.

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

It's hard to get into Newsweek because, as more of our former intellectual magazines take on a pop focus, if there's no buzz, there's no interest.

There are some great shows that come and go really fast, either because the network doesn't give them a chance or they just don't grab on to the psyche of the country quickly enough.

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.

I think TV shows have usurped films!

I still watch 'Idol,' and it's still the No. 1 show, so obviously I'm not the only one who loves to sit at home and be entertained.

I've sort of closed my mind off to reality shows: I just don't watch them, don't care about them, don't know who the characters are, but they're all in general usage.

I liken actors and movies and TV shows to football teams. We all have our favorite ones.

The demand for entertainment is insatiable.

I don't believe that there's such a thing as objectivity in much of journalism, but I think there is a serious effort to and a regard for facts and into taking that stuff seriously is very important to the public discourse and it's very important to democracy.

You see the images that the public is demanding. Why more reality-based TV? You'd think that after the first Survivor it would have gone away, but it hasn't. The public demands it because they get all caught up in the personal stories, and want to see more and more.

It's funny: We have so many shows and so many channels and so many things to occupy people as entertainment, especially with a show like 'Scandal,' which is clearly a hit, with a lot of heat around it - but every once in a while, people will say, 'What are you doing?' and I'll say 'Scandal,' and they'll have no idea what I'm talking about.

I like to watch all those shows that shouldn't be on the air - reality shows.

I've seen 'X Factor' but I don't watch it. I don't watch 'Takeaway' either.

Reality shows help us create a balance between our real and reel side.

There is such a flood of TV shows, movies, video games, comics, and books, but somehow 'Avatar' is still being discovered by each new generation.

It is a strange thing that true crime has now got entertainment value. I don't know why people love shows about crime so much.

In every writers' room I've been in, the first 15-20 minutes of the day are spent discussing water cooler moments from last night's big shows.

After my show and others like it began airing on TV, network executives started to see that there was a market for outrageous, over-the-top content.