Evolution of Television Quotes

It's the digital era. What makes it exciting is that it's both the Golden Age of television and the Wild West of television. Something is happening now that's unprecedented, and we know that we're a part of it. What could be more exciting or better than that? You can't lose because you're on the pony and you're staking the claim.

You push a button and it goes all over the world and on Sunday people are saying, 'Oh, I binge watched all 10 of them. Where's more?' and you go oh, the world has changed. It's not my dad walking to the television set and turning a knob to Ed Sullivan.

The internet has surrounded television and turned television into an art form.

Hi-def is merely the latest in a string of evolutional leaps that have transformed the way we sit slumped in front of a box wishing we were dead.

There used to be a huge snobbism between the film industry and the television industry. I produced and acted in my first - well way back - but the first thing that I produced and acted in was Sarah, Plan and Tall. And the only place to go at the time for really quality television was Hallmark Hall of Fame. And think how much television has changed since then.

I think poets are supposed to be writing for television and film. I grew up in the day of early TV that was so raw and funny, and I think we're in the next important moment of television, where it's really telling the epic of the culture like Charles Dickens was doing in the 19th century with his serialized novels.

When I started in television, it was brand new. It was the miracle over in the corner of your room. Now the audience has seen every story line. People have heard every joke. They can predict the plot almost before a show starts. That's a hard, sophisticated audience to reach.

What I've observed is that television in the last decade has increased to something that's almost unrecognizable. They are feature films. That's a huge shift, and it's something the audience expects. They still may want to watch their half-hour sitcom, but when they watch scripted drama, they expect the standard.

Ultimately, criticism that 'The Real World' has devolved into a lesser enterprise comes from the viewers who came of age alongside it, not the teens of the moment that MTV has always existed for.

I existed before Star Trek. I started in live television. I was there when the cameras were as big as a table, had internal fans that were whirring and tubes that, because of the heat, had to come right up to our face for a close-up. Now, we are talking about green screen and putting us in locations that we'll never visit. What has happened to us is a miracle, and the miracle is our inventiveness. The tragedy of our lives is also our inventiveness.

Another reason for switching to color is world television. In a few years, it will all be in color, and you can't compete against that with black-and-white films.

The days of television as we knew it growing up are over. You have a bigger, wider world audience on the Internet, larger than any American television series. People don't watch television in the same context as before. Nowadays they watch their television on the Internet at their convenience. That's the whole wave, and it's now - not the future.

I think television is moving more into movies, particularly with serialization and almost cinematic proportions and expectations. A show like 'Game of Thrones' is a perfect example of that, or even a show like 'The Wire,' which isn't all about instant gratification it's about inviting someone into the long experience of television the way you'd be invited into a theater for two hours. So I think in that way, and the quality of writing in television is probably much better than most film writing.

I love doing movies, but right now, television is the way Hollywood was in the late '60s and early '70s. The dream era I would have loved to have been part of in Hollywood then is happening right now, but it's happening on television, with these big complicated story arcs and real character-driven shows and sheer ambiguity left and right.

Look at the people who are coming to television Ridley Scott, Ang Lee or Guillermo del Toro - all these great filmmakers - actively put themselves back into TV. That's because the environment is very encouraging for bold storytelling, storytelling that you've never seen before.

You're not chasing syndication any more. It used to be a big thing. "Let's make 100 episodes and we'll get paid for life". You know? And what does the sheer amount of content that's being made do to syndication after a while? It just seems like there's more content than there is hours for everyone to watch it. But it's some of the best content that's ever been created.

There's a lot of great writing, and characters, and stories being told in television nowadays. And much more than there used to be. The opportunities to tell stories, because of the opportunities to show content. And so it's drawing actors from cinema, movie actors, actors to where there's a lot of opportunities to where you can tell stories.

Television has - particularly at the HBO level in the United States - become a completely new genre. Something like Deadwood or The Wire is a whole new thing - there was no equivalent to that medium before. It's like a new way of telling stories.

I think everything keeps changing. There was a time when television was a bad thing for actors and it meant that you could only do television, and now we see everyone does television.

For me, the attraction of TV is that you continue to get to tell those stories and refine those characters. The other thing is that TV, in the last years, got really, really, really good.