Jed Whedon Quotes

I guess maybe someone at 'Dexter' saw the 'Mad Men' stuff and thought, 'He can do this.'

I think there's a lot of interesting stuff on TV. I feel much more optimistic about TV than I do about movies. There will always be good movies but I think, for the most part, it's always going to be a huge fight to get those movies made. TV is the best place to be as a writer, I think.

I am a creator of TV shows. 'Lifestyle' ran for 14 years... that was pleasurable. We also had 'Runaway' for eight years. We did two years of a show called 'The Start of Something Big', and we did a network series called 'Fame, Fortune and Romance.'

One of the great things about doing series television is the guest actors that you can have come on and play around with.

[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.

Nowadays, kids know how a programme like Merlin is made and how it works. But the show just seems to grow in popularity the more it goes on.

I watch 'Sons of Anarchy' and 'Game of Thrones' and 'The Walking Dead' and think, 'I want to create that kind of television!'

'Community' is a great show. I love 'Raising Hope' with Martha Plimpton. And I love 'The Middle' - another Chicagoan in there is Neil Flynn, who used to play the janitor in 'Scrubs.'

That's the great thing about a series: you're driving to work, and you have an idea for a story for your characters, and you can go into work, and it's gonna be a television show. I mean that's what's great about the job.

The thing about many celebrities - not all - is that they're fantastic actors. If we've created a really juicy role, it just feels like a fantastic actor should be playing the part. If it's a long enough part, we consider anyone. If it's a single episode, we don't usually let a single actor on. Because that' s just stunting.

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.

A TV show is constant work, which is the great thing about it.

The same issue is happening on a show like Everybody Loves Raymond now, which is in its eighth year and struggling to come up with good stories. It'll be interesting to see how they do. The bottom line is, it starts with the writers and ends with the writers.

'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.

The great thing about being an actor in a film is that you're able to start knowing exactly where you're going to finish and really paint something in between. You can work to know the arc you need to build. Whereas in television, it is open-ended, and you're constantly guessing. There are pros and cons to both.

I believe that 99 percent of successful TV shows change an immense amount from the pilot to the tenth or twelfth episode.

Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick really changed the way one-hour television looked and the depth of how deep it could cut emotionally.

Great actors help. Every project is different. Sometimes it's completely open, and I've been able to cast who I've wanted. And then sometimes people want a certain kind of actor.

A lot of writers dream of feature films, but television - by way of TNT, CBS, Lifetime, and Hallmark Hall of Fame - has always called my name. And after seeing 'True Detective,' can there be any doubt that the storytelling on TV is as genius as it gets?

I'm a writer; I've worked as much as a writer as I have as an actor, so I was in a script-note session at Imagine for a TV show I wrote that they were producing, and they happened to say, 'You'd be great as Crosby, do you want to do this show we're doing, 'Parenthood?'

Obviously, for me, story is first and foremost, even in the face of the attractive idea of having all the cast there, or having a great piece of talent come to it.

Reality TV finds talented people. There are no scripts. The editing is what it's all about. Great editing makes those shows.

It's not new: In the '70s, Archie Bunker said terrible things on 'All in the Family,' but it was all in Carroll O'Connor's performance. You saw lack of intelligence, and you laughed.

With film, there's a consistency to it, but what I like about the TV shows that I've been fortunate to do, like 'Friday Night Lights' and 'True Blood,' is that it feels like you're doing a film.

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.