Television Culture Quotes

I do love TV as a medium.

I grew up in the '50s, in New York City, where television was born. There were 90 live shows every week, and they used a lot of kids. There were schools just for these kids. There was a whole world that doesn't exist anymore.

When I was growing up, I used to love television. TV was everything. And it was a real connector for my family.

Nothing is really real unless it “happens” on television…Television has brought an inversion of our consciousness. When we take our eyes off the tube, we see things that are not quite authentic – or rather, which gain authenticity only by their resemblance to how things happen on television

What this generation was bred to at television's knees was not wisdom, but cynicism.

I was raised, I feel like, on television, definitely a child of TV, and was always fascinated by storytelling.

I call the '70s the "golden age of television"; in the early '70s there were sensationally good shows.

Well, certainly I think American television is - that's proper TV.

They call television a medium because nothing's well done.

I have friends at home who love 'The Tonight Show' with Jimmy Fallon. They live in the U.K., and they've never seen an episode, but they love it.

It's all about media culture and people on television, and that feeling comfortable, friendly, or warm toward a candidate [in the elections] is a reason people would emotionally attach themselves to that candidate. I get the mechanics of it, I just hate that it's true.

I'm very intrigued that in this culture of reality television and celebrity - which is an enormous industry and generates billions and billions of dollars - we're so resourceful.

In an automobile civilization, which was one of constant motion and activity, there was almost no time to think; in a television one, there is small desire.

I can't imagine seeing Batman in black and white. It was such a colourful TV series. I know. I'm ancient. It wasn't abnormal to be without a television in those days. People who had colour were special.

TV is just an incredible media.

So why do people keep on watching? The answer, by now, should be perfectly obvious: we love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist. In fact, deep in their hearts, this is what the spuds crave most: a rich, new, participatory life.

I'm a big game show fan. When you're a poor person, you watch game shows. I don't think people realize that. Maybe everybody watches game shows, but when you're poor, you live vicariously through those people.

Television has accustomed us to brief, intimate, telegraphic, visual, narrative messages. Candidates are learning to act, speak, and think in television's terms. In the process they are transforming speeches, debates, and their appearances in news into ads.

Television is not vulgar because people are vulgar; it is vulgar because people are similar in their prurient interests and sharply differentiated in their civilized concerns.

I was raised on NBC television.

Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore -- and this is the critical point -- how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails. (92)

Before I started on 'Borgen', people introduced me to some great American box-sets to convince me that TV could be good. I now watch them all the time. Amy Poehler is very funny in 'Parks and Recreation' and 'In Treatment,' with Gabriel Byrne, is also really good.

That's just the culture that television breeds. No one wants to be difficult. You want to bring solutions, not problems.

When you watch television, you never see people watching television. We love television because it brings us a world in which television does not exist.

As an art person, I think all television changed me a lot.