Steven Johnson Quotes

Television is a powerful medium that has to be used for something better than sitcoms and police shows. On the other hand, if you don't recognize the forces that play on what people watch and what they don't then you're a fool and you should be in a different business.

I've sort of closed my mind off to reality shows: I just don't watch them, don't care about them, don't know who the characters are, but they're all in general usage.

I have so much to thank reality TV for.

The reality television shows are a big hit with the masses with their Bollywood songs. Even if these TV shows are scripted, people are watching them.

At the end of the day, television is an entertainment platform and we are here to entertain the masses.

The BBC is a very confident broadcasting organisation and it needs brands like 'Top of the Pops' and 'Top Gear.'

When television is good, nothing - not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers - nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there for a day without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

If anything, I want to bring television back up to where it will entertain and engage a gamer.

'The Piano' ended up on television. Everything ends up there anyway.

Every time you think television has hit its lowest ebb, a new program comes along to make you wonder where you thought the ebb was.

The best shows succeed because they tap into a national conversation.

I try to work on shows that I would want to watch.

Reality shows have a lot to answer for. They applaud mediocrity.

I think TV shows have usurped films!

I don't want to sound pretentious, but you could hire a bunch of monkeys to be on a TV show, and if it's successful, then everything's perfect and everybody's happy.

Now, having had this experience, I can't say really what they were looking for. I don't know their minds. But every time I see a reality show, it seems that the most entertaining parts on other reality shows are when they make their guests look foolish.

I still watch 'Idol,' and it's still the No. 1 show, so obviously I'm not the only one who loves to sit at home and be entertained.

I think there are ways in which shows can pop their heads up a little bit in the morass of everything you can watch.

You know what shows today are missing? Stars.

The best businesses that all of us have in the entertainment business are cable content channels, which have a dual revenue stream.

If there's room for 30 reality shows, surely there's room for two amazing costume dramas.

There's not a lot of light on television.

My job was to find interesting material that would give us a quality television show.

Reality is a genre that seems to be here to stay. I don't know how many of the new shows will last, but the more competition you have, the harder that pie is to slice up.

Everybody knows things are not the same. The people running the TV end of a major vertically integrated company know how much money a successful show can make.