Dan Harmon Quotes

When I was little, there were three channels.

Every so often, there is an article saying the old kind of talk show isn't possible now. In the oldest kind of talk show, you only had the choice of that or two other channels!

When we started in television, there was that magic box in the corner of the room, and 'Oh my gosh - look what it's doing!'

I am old enough to have grown up glued to a screen offering only three alternatives, each of which was an all-powerful national network that seemed permanently ensconced in the entertainment stratosphere.

The TV season is a year-long thing now, and the networks are starting to look at it that way, thanks to cable, satellites, and competition.

I love watching old sitcoms. It's very inspiring to watch 'Mary Tyler Moore' and 'Golden Girls.' I have watched them over and over again for years.

I love sitcoms, and I grew up on sitcoms. That's my tasty junk food.

And we do talk a lot about my past and my impression of things and how it relates to what we're doing now. The Brady Bunch, in its heyday, was really the genesis of when TV started to become the force that it is today.

When reality television really hit, I just had a backlash towards reality. It seemed like a cheap way to make a product. And then when music reality and 'Idol hit,' I just didn't watch it, it seemed novelty. And of course the story of 'Idol,' this is one of the greatest stories in television history.

I'm an old git now, so I would say this, but television was better when there were less channels. There was more concentration and selection in terms of the output.

I grew up with four T.V. channels. If you missed a show, you missed it. You gotta wait a week for the next one. I'd mail-order books: take a quarter, get an envelope, send off for it and wait until it arrived. I grew up waiting for things.

Television is more of a business. You can't take as many risks, because there's so many channels now, and the advertising's dropping.

I remember growing up with television, from the time it was just a test pattern, with maybe a little bit of programming once in a while.

All three networks have always had a morning show but now cable of course is taking some of that audience away and a variety of other things, probably the Internet as well.

In the early '90s, there was such a limited idea of what you could see on TV.

When I was a kid growing up, there might be 10 shows on the air that had been on for ten seasons or eleven seasons. 'Gunsmoke' ran for over twenty years.

The reason 'The Carol Burnett Show' did so well in the ratings is because people were looking for that comfort zone when the whole family sat around and watched television and enjoyed it.

People were fed up with reality shows about midgets getting married and weird Jerry Springer talk shows. There had been a real dry spell of intelligent family-oriented viewing: the type of program that Mom, Dad and the kids can all watch together. With 'Lost,' there are just so many characters for people to invest in.

Sunday night was such a big night for television when I was growing up - you know, 'The Wonderful World of Disney.'

When I was a young kid, the best stuff on television was always the BBC period dramas - it was what we sat down as a family to watch and what people talked about and looked forward to.

A generation ago, or two, when there were three channels, plus PBS, and when you needed - when you needed 15 million people to make a living, the media could focus on the broad country. And most people had no choice about getting political information. It was there at 6:30 whether you wanted it or not.

When we did 'Thirtysomething,' television was either about doctors, lawyers, or cops.

I started working in the mid-to-late Seventies, when television was not what it is now.

I watched a lot of 'I Love Lucy.' Then I went to college, and I didn't watch TV, really. I don't know: something happened after 'Friends' went off the air. I think something dipped in the whole sitcom world.

I always wanted to get on the telly. Then see when I did, and there was talk about doing more online, Comedy Labs or iPlayer, I was: 'Naw, naw, naw, I want to be On The Telly that sits in the living room and folk watch it together.