Nestor Carbonell Quotes

I really like the stuff that Showtime puts out. I think that 'Homeland' is phenomenal. I think 'Dexter' is amazing.

I'd always thought that 'NYPD Blue' really would open those doors. While I think it created a much broader template for cable, I don't think it really did that much for network television.

I think cable TV in the United States is amazing right now. It's reinvented television, really. What's going on in the States with some of these cable shows like 'Breaking Bad' and 'Mad Men' is amazing stuff.

Television has changed. There's obviously the generic shows, but on HBO and AMC, there are some really great series, so I'm not closed off to television. If there's an amazing role with amazing people and a great story, I'd definitely be open to it.

I'm very, very proud to have been at what I feel are two of the pivotal moments in this whole new Golden Era of television - one being 'The Sopranos' with HBO and now with Netflix expanding that whole HBO concept to the world and making it more of a global thing. It's been wonderful to witness that from those two vantage points.

With the advent of cable and such, you guys are calling it the golden age of TV in terms of the writing and stuff. But it's like different branches of a big tree that TV has become.

Without 'Twin Peaks,' there would have been no 'Northern Exposure,' 'Picket Fences,' 'X-Files' or 'Alias.' It started the movement of 'off-center' television.

Television has - particularly at the HBO level in the United States - become a completely new genre. Something like Deadwood or The Wire is a whole new thing - there was no equivalent to that medium before. It's like a new way of telling stories.

I think network television is really hard because it has to sail right away. HBO's so much more nurturing, patient. They think it takes a while for a show to kind of congeal and figure out what its strong spots are.

The whole cable-TV original programming just changed the nature of television.

Twin Peaks was special because it was so groundbreaking. In the early '90s it really changed television a lot. A bunch of weird shows, like Northern Exposure, came on after that.

English television from the Fifties to the Nineties was the least bad in the world, and now it's just as bad as it is anywhere.

Prior to 'The Shield,' basic cable was just a wasteland of reruns and NASCAR. When we came along, I think there was a collective, 'Hey, if they can do that, why can't we?' from the basic-cable networks of the world. We ended up being the cornerstone for a network, and a great one.

If you had told me in the Seventies and Eighties that TV would be as edgy or edgier than most films, and more intelligently written than most films, I wouldn't have believed it. There's great stuff out there.

A lot of people always look back at 'Twin Peaks' and say that was the start of this explosion we've had in good television drama, but we did it in a time when there were still only three networks.

Television is better than it's ever been in history. A lot of stories are being pushed - because of how complicated they are to make - toward Netflix and other channels on cable.

It feels as though, with all of these cable series or Internet shows or limited series events that are only 10 or 13 episodes... the quality is really rising.

I still think, most of the time, when people called shows like 'The Sopranos' or 'Deadwood' 'art' that they were correct.

The good thing is that I really think that American television is in kind of a second golden age. Even though there's a lot of reality and all those contest shows, which aren't my kind of shows, the scripted stuff that's going on is so good right now because of basic cable. Everyone has stepped it up and realised that people like quality.

When 'Sex and the City' aired its first season, people didn't know about HBO as a place for original series. People weren't saying, 'Oh I've got to watch 'Sex and the City'!' They found it later. In some ways, it helped change what people thought of HBO.

You have Showtime, you have AMC, you have all of these, you know, incredible networks that are now bringing forth their product without the handcuffs, if you will, of trying to sell soap to the entire country.

Not to toot our own horn, but when 'The Sopranos' was on, it was as good as any movie that was coming out in the theater. I think that goes for a lot of shows today.

The problem, when comparing contemporary television to television in 1974, is that TV has become not just bad but sad.

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

I am a competitive person. But more good TV is more good TV.