Steven Levitan Quotes

In TV we've used something that I love... it's called process. I love process.

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.

It's actually much harder to develop a TV show than I had anticipated.

There's a certain order to network shows that doesn't exist so much in cable, which is, you know, if you want to change a line you've got to talk to the writer.

TV is designed a certain way where you have three, four days on stage and three or four days out. You're basically making a feature every seven days. You have to shoot an hour's worth.

I was creator and executive producer of 'The Brady Bunch' on TV. The stage version was done by others, but it was a repeat of the old scripts. The 'Gilligan' musical is a completely original work with all seven characters and 18 original songs.

I'd read a lot of scripts, and I remember reading 'Orange Is the New Black,' and it was at the head of the pack. I remember thinking, 'Wow, that is really good. I would love to be a part of that.'

One of the things I really love about TV is this symbiotic relationship you can get between the writers and the actors, and the characters start to come to life because you start to collaborate.

As an actor, you want new challenges. U.S. TV can be very formulaic. So when something gets a reaction, as 'The Slap' has, that's great. The sense I get is that it's not about me or my performance. More than anything it's the subject matter that people are focused on.'

I am the lead on NBC's 'Siberia,' and I loved that experience.

When 'Family Guy' started, we wanted to make it more like a sitcom. And there was very little music.

I know what it takes to go from the point where someone's looking at a newspaper article, and thinking, 'Oh, this would make a great TV series,' to the point where you're actually on a set and there's a camera aimed at someone.

Well, there's much more time to do a weekly show, and much more coverage - as it turns out, it was all preparation for the stuff I'm doing now - but it was interesting to see how much time was spent on how little airtime, compared to knocking out a show a day on the soaps.

I'd love to do another television series. I really love the writing process, and as an actor I really like how much you get to examine in television.

In TV, you're always confused because you legitimately don't know what you're doing the next week.

I have to tell you, TV is an incredibly difficult medium. The most challenging show to do is the hour long dramedy. It's a very tricky format.

Now that I know what goes into making a pilot, keeping it on the air, and keeping your fans, I'm at a point now where I do a pilot and just hope for the best. If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out.

Being an executive producer allows me the opportunity to create original content, and I can't wait to show my fans what we have in store on 'Kocktails with Khloe.'

It's funny - I was a big fan of 'The Sopranos.' It became kind of a threat to 'The X-Files' in a way because they could play with language, character, and story in ways that we never could because of the limitations of network television.

I would really like to do a really cool one-hour show, maybe on, like, HBO or something like that; or something that I've spent a couple of years developing so it would be exactly the character and exactly in with a huge push behind it; or I would maybe want to do a sitcom; something light and funny.

If you're on a network show, it's either some wacky sitcom or a drama where you're servicing a procedure.

Another show I really enjoyed working on was 'Raising The Bar.' I did four or five episodes of that show.

If I'm going to do television, I wanted that 'North and South' experience. I wanted something that's going to challenge me on a constant basis.

Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick really changed the way one-hour television looked and the depth of how deep it could cut emotionally.

When you're making TV, the last thing you want to do is watch TV. It's too much.