Shawn Ryan Quotes

There's certain things that you can do on cable that you can't do here on network TV, so then you have to think outside the box a little bit.

They'll say, That's funny, but you can't do that on TV.

In a TV show, you are restricted to a lot of things. On television, you can't put the content you can put on web series and on the channels digitally.

On network, you have limitations for how raunchy it can get and how violent it can get.

In TV today, you can say I pricked my finger, but you can't say it the other way around.

The ratings board is completely different when it comes to film versus the television arena.

I don't think there's one thing I've ever said on the radio that would have been found indecent or obscene.

They're pretty particular about what they show. They certainly edit the scripts and have conversations with the writers about what they are and aren't willing to portray. But the writers and the network are pretty much on the same page.

There are obviously legal restrictions on what you can do on TV in the States, as there are everywhere.

A film has to maintain a certain decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast audience.

That's what's nice about being on Comedy Central. You can't show your boobs even if you wanted to.

The networks are different so they have a different approach. Obviously, with The Shield - that was on FX so they had a little bit more leeway as far as the dialogue was concerned and even the content and what they showed the viewers, which is a great thing. But we will push it to the limit as far as FOX will let us go; that's for damn sure.

Our legislation addresses broadcasts over the public airwaves, but I hope the cable and satellite industries see the importance of this issue and voluntarily create a family tier of programming and offer culturally responsible products.

In terms of language, yeah we get bleeped and blurred and things, but in terms of content, I would probably say we're getting away with more here than we could get away with in Britain. And that surprised us so much!

The only place we were really told to tone it down - where other people would use the word censorship, but I wouldn't - was when we did MTV right after the Beavis and Butt-head thing.

You know... the only person I really had to please after a point was the MPAA. Because Lions' Gate was like, hey, whatever you can get away with is fine, we don't care.

When you do a film, when you do a television show, eventually someone comes along and will say to you, 'Don't say that because, one, you will offend someone, or, two, no one will get that. Someone's going to be confused by that, not get the reference and feel abandoned, and then they will get angry at the entertainment.'

I do think that television, in its early years, played a significant role in that standard-setting, enforcing a certain decency among people. They took their role seriously, and the people behind the camera took their role seriously, too.

You have tremendous freedom in the young adult book world to write what you want. You can put R-rated content in a book that you can't in a similarly targeted movie.

In the United States, viewers don't get to see a lot of things we can show in other countries. We didn't get to show our naked Twister game from Wild On Jamaica, but we definitely filmed it.

With a lot of those 'S.N.L.' shorts, we would do them just as we wanted to do them and then beep out the bad words. Since it was late night T.V., they let us get away with a lot.

We need to police ourselves in the media.

We don't have any rules about how we depict violence, or how much violence is in a movie. It's a calibration on a case-by-case basis.

My mother had to tailor what I watched.

Network TV is so limiting. There are so many parameters.