Robert Greenblatt Quotes

Every so often, it's time to make a change with a showrunner; you evaluate the creative and how the show is run, how the writing staff works.

Being an executive producer allows me the opportunity to create original content, and I can't wait to show my fans what we have in store on 'Kocktails with Khloe.'

It's actually much harder to develop a TV show than I had anticipated.

When I create a TV show, it's so that I can write it. I'm not an empire builder; my writing staff is usually a combination of two kinds of people - experts in the world the show is set in, and young writers who will not be unhappy if they're not writing scripts.

Jeff Wachtel, who was the main reason our show came back, and also got picked up to begin with, is from the New York theater.

I essentially have always directed everything on my TV show without using that title; I edited and wrote all my stuff.

Making '1600 Penn' was really fun, and I learned a lot.

I feel like, with any show, the creator should stick to it the first few years and get it off the ground.

To have the canvas of something like an Impact Wrestling, something that had TV and be able to be a creative input guy and come up with stuff, I would love to, and I would be up for that challenge.

I used to be an architect, so I have a series I am working on with USA Network that I created and am co-writing.

It's not that writing staffs don't change at all, but they don't change very much. Directors are freelancers. There are directors who do five or 10 episodes of a show every year for years, but most directors are freelance, they come and go.

That was a really interesting series [Threshold ] that I think would've been really great had it continued. I know Brannon Braga, who was running the show at the time, had a lot of really interesting ideas for what was going to happen the second, third, fourth, and fifth seasons, and they had it really planned out what was going to go on. But CBS just decided to pull the plug on it.

One of the things that I learned in television, and one of the beauties of television, is that, if you have a strong writing staff, they rely on you just as much as you rely on them. They look to me or the other actors to help inspire them to take the character in interesting directions.

Bill Prady and Chuck Lorre, the guys who run that show [Big Bang Theory], are really funny and really smart, and the cast is fantastic to work with.

I was writing for live television. And I said to myself, someday, soon as I can, I have got to do a situation comedy.

I've been co-writing a TV thing with Bryan Cranston, which we are going to find out soon if it's moving forward or not which is for Amazon.

I've been writing so much. And what happens with TV is that they split [Taboo] into two blocks, so you get a director that does four and another director that does another four. You commit yourself to seven days a week, for 12 or 13 hour days for a long time. I couldn't really do that.

Being on the floor of a TV show is sometimes a quite frustrating experience.

[Townies] was a huge cast. It was a bit ungainly, I think with 12 regular characters they had to keep writing for.

The most rewarding part of writing for TV is - a year ago I would have said it's just watching it on TV, it's just having been done with it and then collecting all that energy.

Right when I started getting solid was when I was offered a lot of writing work. And when The Ben Stiller Show was picked up, I realized there was no way for me to do stand-up three or four nights a week and run this television show with Ben. So that was the moment when I had to make a choice.

One of the things I've learned - before I would go on a show, I was like, "Oh God, I hate that show" or "That show is gonna get canceled." But now after being full-time on a show, you see how difficult it is and how much work goes into it and how so many decisions are based on finances or people's schedules or talent or location issues. It's a miracle that anything gets made.

You know when a script is good but you don't have any knowledge how visually it is going to look. When this [Happy Valley] came out and I saw the first episode and thought it was terrific.

In television, the creator is really the voice...

[Television] is a great medium for writers, because there's just no time for a studio to interfere very long. You write it, you shoot it; it's on TV.