Ray McKinnon Quotes

Having gotten TV shows on the air, that's so much less work that trying to get the 'Veronica Mars' movie made.

Pablo Picasso would paint a painting and hang it on the wall, and you would go and see the painting exactly how he wanted it to be made. But if you have an idea for a TV show, for example, you're beholden to studios to produce it and distributors to distribute it.

I got to do Disney Sunday movies. I got to do a TV pilot there. And it really helped me to realise that I needed to not just be a writer, but a producer, to see my work up on the screen the way I wanted it to look and play.

I was running the show on 'United States of Tara' and 'How To Make It In America' where I could say, 'Okay, I'm in charge of everything now.' But it still wasn't my show.

I read every draft of every episode of every series produced at FX.

'Arrested Development' is great; Mitch Hurwitz is great. Plus, it's the one show I've ever had where, on the small parts, he just let me cast people.

In TV, you usually don't get a chance to fix anything. It's always easier to cancel something than fix it.

The idea of being a show runner was very attractive to me, to create and control something.

I think that casting is probably the most important thing in television production.

The great thing about TV is that it's so fluid. When you bring in someone for one quick role and they're fantastic, you can bring them back.

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.

I would like to see more of the making of just regular television shows. Like the casting process. I think it's so fascinating to watch the actors come in and see how they discuss everybody afterwards. It's a crazy world that has no rhyme or reason.

I think, a lot of times, network shows are under a lot of mandates. There's a lot of moving pieces. There's a lot of money. There's a lot of people who are going to be disappointed if anything goes wrong.

I really enjoy working, you know, on streaming outlets because there's so much creative control for the creators of the shows, and, you know, you're allowed to make such great television.

Usually in TV... A TV director could be anything from a main grip to just a glorified cameraman, and sometimes a director can be the person who is hired last. It's very much a producer's medium.

I just want to make TV that I want to see.

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

You have to fight to get your show not only on the air but then to keep it what it is and make sure that it doesn't get manipulated into something else.

Showrunning is when you're the constant creative voice in the show. For a year-and-a-half, you are working on the scripts, you're fine-tuning them, you're the final say on the edit, the music and the cast.

Ultimately, in regular television, you've got seven or eight executives and maybe 50 people in the room with dials who are deciding whether a show goes - and it's not a great way, because we're making mass entertainment.

I feel like I don't have much of a preference. With TV, it's just a longer process, so you need to be more sure that you really want to be involved in it for a longer time than you would be with film.

People don't always understand the way it works with casting. TV projects tend to be commissioned to screen at a particular time of year, so your shooting dates are chosen to meet that. And then the casting is a matter of choosing from the actors who are available for those dates.

Closest to my heart is probably 'Toast of London' because I came up with the character, based on a bunch of people I worked with in the industry. And Channel 4 didn't mess with it. Head to screen, it was exactly as I wanted it.

The Daily Show writers are incredibly smart and very well plugged-in but occasionally they would need me for certain specific things, and I'd be like, 'Yeah, I completely know how to do that; I can solve that problem,and then I'd be like, 'Mom?

American television is very much created by the writers, just the volume of it. The writers are so key. You're just trying to do something that serves that script. And in general, film isn't all about the script, really.