Marshall Herskovitz Quotes

I've done, like, eight pilots, and every time, everyone thinks it's going to go for 10 years.

I had developed a sitcom with UPN, but it wasn't picked up.

Pilot season isn't perfect, and it certainly is a very difficult time. But pilot season does work for us.

The decision as to why a show makes it has to do with politics and money.

I've been on one TV series after another. None of the network decisions have ever made sense to me.

I've done 10 or 11 pilots for network television, which is ridiculous.

When you're making a pilot, what you're mostly thinking is, 'Please let this be a real job, please.'

Like, to do a pilot, you don't know what's going to happen with it.

There was so long from when we did the pilot and then when the show was eventually picked up by Comedy Central - and, in fact, we had to shoot the pilot twice.

As actors, if you get a pilot on HBO or on USA, your odds are good that it's going to get picked up.

That's the hard part of television: When you walk into the network tests, you're signing away seven years of your life.

What I do know is how difficult it is in this industry to get a show on the air. There's so many different stages: getting a script bought by the network, then getting a pilot made and having that pilot go to series, and then, when that series gets on the air, having people watch it.

One year, I did 10 or 11 pilots of TV shows that never went anywhere.

Pilots get made, and they don't go to series. Stuff gets written and never gets made. I've tried to develop stuff that never went. It comes and it goes. It's a part of the process.

Pilot season in L.A. is just this blood bath. They make so many pilots, and such a small percentage are picked up. And then if you are picked up, there are so many variables. You have to get a good time slot, and you have to get promoted. And then you have to thrive in that time slot.

One of the things I'm proudest of is, on my record 'That Was the Year that Was' in 1965, I made a joke about spending $20 billion sending some clown to the moon. I was against the manned space program then, and I'm even more against it now, that whole waste of money.

I feel terrible for directors of TV because all the episodes have to look the same. They make a great series for five or six years, and then when it's canceled, they can't break out on their own.

NBC's pilot season of 1994 is legendary in the business. In a world where failure is commonplace, we midwifed the birth of both 'Friends' and 'ER'. While 'ER' came essentially out of the blue, we'd been casting around for a 'Friends'-like show for some time at the network.

For the most part, Hollywood is very transactional. People want to make movies and television shows.

If I went in to pitch this show to a network, I would be laughed out of the room.

If your ratings are high and there's money being made, you're allowed to be a perfectionist in television.

Because television doesn't offer the kind of budget that a movie offers, you've got to be a little more careful where you spend the money to put the fiction in science.

From an actor's point of view, you never really like to hope that anything will go beyond the pilot. I'd always say to my agent every time I filmed a pilot, 'Great! Well, I'll see you at pilot season.'

It's funny: All my friends back home are always wondering why every television show I'm on is a drama, but all the comedy pilots I did died a slow and painful death.

You know, if a TV show dropped into my lap out of the blue, I would have a hard time turning it down because there just isn't the money in theater that there is on TV.