Roy Nelson Quotes

Football is so popular, people know they can sell their story in a newspaper form or a rating on TV, so they use football because what they are more about is the business of, you know, selling newspapers or seeing commercial time on TV.

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.

I can't create magic, where all my serials will have the highest ratings.

Surely, AP or the coaches are all aware everybody has agendas. Anybody who's on TV has one. You know, that's viewership and ratings and those kinds of things.

Great fights means great TV ratings.

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

Every single television product has the ambition to chase ratings, every one of them. Many have other ambitions, for many, ratings are not #1. But my experience on TV, and on the entertainment side, has been entirely ratings-based. When I look at TV I look at ratings. And I never second guess ratings. Never.

People magazine had been around for a short period of time, but nobody had thought about putting entertainment news on a nightly basis on television.

It is too soon to tell, but old, tired 'Survivor' last night beat 'X Factor.' We're really proud of that. We're anticipating a very strong season for CBS.

A show that no one thought had a chance has just finished its fifth year: Charmed. I think it's tougher for the younger networks, so I think they have a little more patience for the sake of the show. But who knows?

But TV has changed completely. It's not until you come into people's homes that everyone says, 'You're a success now.'

'Homeland' was a sensation out of the gate in 2011, gathering acclaim and sweeping up Emmys, and the reason such shows are so overrated is because, unlike with other forms of popular art, success in TV is measured almost purely by how obsessive we become.

The problem is, there are definitely some genuinely lame things on television, and there's more at the bottom of the barrel, because the barrel in a sense has gotten bigger.

You could put on monkeys jumping up and down and get bigger numbers than MSNBC.

There's a huge demand for my entertainment, and I can't meet the need. So I decided to try a TV show to reach as many of my fans as possible.

Baseball hasn't been the national pastime for many years now - no sport is. The national pastime, like it or not, is watching television.

You can make a good show, but you still need some magical alchemy to get people to watch.

I think there's really no rhyme or reason as to what keeps a show on air. Surely it's a numbers game, but some of the best shows get canceled, and some shows where you don't totally understand why they're on the air stay on for 15 or 20 years.

I get a lot of influence from pro wrestling. People are like, 'Oh, it's fake.' But it's not about whether the guy wins or loses, it's about how he entertains you the whole time you're watching.

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.

You're in the business - when you're a writer, producer, director - to get ratings.

It's a strange thing to have a successful television show because if it's too interesting... people don't really pay attention when they watch TV. It has to be good, but not so interesting that you really have to pay attention because people multitask. So, if a show demands your entire attention, it has a tough time making it.

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.

The landscape is television has changed so much, because there are so many outlets, that the odds of getting a zeitgeisty hit - you know how 'American Idol' seems to appeal to every human being on the planet? Doing that in comedy nowadays is very, very hard.

Nobody really knows what makes a hit TV show.