Parker Stevenson Quotes

I don't want to carry a network show. I don't want to give up 10 months, working 17 hours a day, up at five in the morning.

It's a lot of a workload doing an hour dramatic show. It's just incredible what little time off you get.

On a television show, you basically make a movie a week. Movies take three months - it's crazy. They're so slow, it's like vacation to me.

A TV show is constant work, which is the great thing about it.

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'll cop to this: so much of doing a 22-episode show is just keeping your head above water.

It's an interesting thing to come to New York and do a television show. You're doing 10 hours of content in four and a half months. Eighty-hour weeks are par for the course.

'Law & Order' is a six-month shoot. Everything has to be crammed in. I had so much fun, but it wasn't a holiday. We had seriously long days, and we'd finish at 8 P.M. and start again at 7 A.M. We were doing six-day weeks, which sometimes tripped onto the seventh. But I loved it all.

TV is a hard thing to do. It's a hard thing to get a show.

The thing about working on a TV show is that it becomes, very quickly, all consuming.

Series work is just grueling.

They've got to deliver twenty-six episodes a season and they're not going to beat their heads up against a wall if they feel something didn't, like, pan out the way they had hoped.

Doing one movie every two years is about all I can handle 'cause, being the creator at '30 Rock', my year there starts in the middle of June and goes back around until March.

I liked working in a series, going to work every day and not having to leave town for long locations. I was producing them and building an audience.

At our best, it's a good experience but we do 22 episodes a year, so there are some clunkers.

Normally, if you do a television show, it's 25 episodes. Your year is kind of shot, you know what I mean?

I would rather make feature movies because, let's face it, you take more time. You take seven days to do a show, and you take three or four months to do a movie.

I remember what it was like to be doing 'Lost' and how creatively immersive it was. I just couldn't really engage on anything else, other than 'Lost;' I was just thinking about it all the time, and then there was just the pure workload, the 70- or 80-hour weeks.

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.

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

The truth is, working on single camera, show or film, you have no life. You work 60-80 hours a week. You're up before your kid gets up, and you're home when they go to sleep.

'Grey's Anatomy,' that was a great show to be part of, but they work really long hours. They were all just really tired. Just worn out.

With TV, you just have to finish the days and get the episodes out. And it's always going to be an impossible schedule. That's the funny thing with TV that not a lot of people realize.

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

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