Fred Silverman Quotes

Broadcasting for advertisers is still the best game in town, and they know it. Look, I admire a lot of the shows on cable. I think 'Mad Men' is wonderful. I think 'Breaking Bad' is wonderful. But let's remember they're about one-tenth the audience of NCIS.

7th Heaven is quite a hit for them now, and they are hoping to appeal to a very similar audience with our show; skewed slightly older I guess, since it's a 9:00 to 10:00 show.

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.

When it moved to Friday night it disappeared, when they find another show that can do what The Simpsons does, they will be delighted to do cancel The Simpsons.

What's great about cable is that the ceiling of expectation is lowered because fewer people have to tune in for it to be a success. You don't need 23 million people a week like you do in broadcast.

I know enough to know every time a cable show beats a broadcast show... you've attracted people outside the scope of what you normally reach.

Network TV is such a difficult, competitive landscape.

Television is not an easy medium, as keeping the audience glued to the TV screens day after day is something which requires a lot of effort.

The worst thing you can do is end up with a network show on cable or end up with a cable show on network.

When 'Blue Collar TV' was on the 'WB,' we were their second-highest rated show, but they didn't know what to do with us. They had 'Reba,' which was number one, and we were number two, and they didn't want to be known as the hayseed network, so they kind of dropped us, even though we were pulling great numbers.

Especially with DVRs nowadays, people have their roster. More and more, it's not just, 'I'll watch what's on at 9 P.M.' They have their backlog of the shows they always watch, that they record every week, and it's a matter of, how do you get into that list?

Television viewers, they've been around a long time. They've been watching this thing now for 50 years. I mean, they know exactly what's happening when it comes to television programming. You can't put anything over on them anymore.

The truth is, we have this idea that late night is about creativity and being cool, but that's not our job. Our job is to get as many people watching the commercials in between our show. That's the reality of it.

Honestly, I don't know enough about what's a good timeslot and what isn't. Either you have a timeslot where nobody is really tuning in, which isn't good, or you're in a good hour, and then you've got a lot of competition.

There's not a lot of really great, deep, serialized television, and we can see from the data that that's what people want.

What Must-See T.V. was all about was one network, one night, for one decade. And a third of the country would come and watch Must-See T.V. And you didn't dare go to work the next day, because if you hadn't watched, you would be left out of the conversation, that water-cooler conversation.

Television can be a very fickle place.

We had more viewers on the broadcast network than we did on the cable channel.

I have no problem at all going back and forth between cable and network.

I'd like to do a little bit more adventurous TV. Maybe Showtime or HBO or just a little bit edgier. But I would go back to NBC, CBS, whatever.

I had kind of sworn off network TV a while ago.

With network, shows are pulled half the time after three episodes whether they're good or they're not good. It's a numbers game. With cable, they can take a lot more liberties.

I've been a huge fan of the cable network FX for a very, very long time. I think their brand of comedy is incredible. For me, as an audience member, that's a go-to channel.

I think television is a big commitment, so it has to be something that you're really excited about and something that you want to potentially commit a lot of time to.

For me, I think there's a lot more room in cable television to tell broader stories. NBC and the networks, they're all very mainstream, and they're a little more conservative in how they approach storytelling.