Television History Quotes

We'll never see national shows with 45 shares again.

I worked for CBS News in the aftermath of all the greatness. I actually brought coffee to Edward R. Murrow.

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.

But I never, never thought of the ministry nor did - of course, television when I was growing up, there was no television. So I didn't know anything about it.

I was an avid reader as a child because we didn't have television in Ireland until the mid-'60s.

'Fresh Off the Boat' will be syndicated. This show and these characters will live forever in the pantheon of classic family sitcoms.

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.

My father was invited to play on a television show when I was 17 or 18 that was an early equivalent of educational television, a Sunday afternoon kind of variety art show.

America Held Hostage won 24 Emmys for ABC News, but someone forgot to include my name on the list of people responsible for the show.

When I came to England at the very beginning of commercial television it was easy for me because I was only doing one or two shows a week at most. It was really a holiday.

I was a pioneer in MTV and I was there from the very beginning. So I saw how that developed and how loose it was and how much fun it was in its looseness. And I was influenced a lot by that.

Nowadays, people always say, how come he's doing such young shows? But they never mention The Mod Squad. I was very proud of that show. It's the first time an African-American guy kissed a white girl.

Since cable got the power and freedom it has, you can explore someone in a way you couldn't in the old days when Mannix was Mannix was Mannix. I thought maybe that Nixon would be an interesting series.

Back in the fifties I was the hot, young comic on CBS and a regular on 'The Ed Sullivan Show.' I was also starring in shows on Broadway and acting in dramatic programs on television. Those were the glory days of television. It was like theater. It was live. If an actor forgot a line, he improvised. There was an immediacy to it.

I'm so privileged to sit where Diane Sawyer and Peter Jennings sat.

If I couldn't be Dick Van Dyke, I wanted to be Art Carney.

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

I think back to my time in children's television, back in the 1970s, and the amount of innovation that was going on then. Because the mass market wasn't focused on it, so you had a freedom to do amazing things, like 'Vision On,' and 'Tiswas.'

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.

I believe I became one of the first singers to be launched via television exposure. I guess I was a new kind of musical stylist for a new kind of media.

My father Lloyd Bridges was very versatile in his parts, but he had a hit in the '60s 'Sea Hunt,' where he played a skin diver. And he was so into that role that people actually thought he was a skin-diver.

When 'Twin Peaks' happened the first time, I was a stage actor in Seattle. I was called in for an audition for this pilot, and at that time, it was called 'Northwest Passage,' and nobody knew anything. I thought, 'Oh, okay, Lewis and Clark.' And from that moment, I fell down the rabbit hole.

Television viewers, they've been around a long time. They've been watching this thing now for 50 years. I mean, they know exactly what's happening when it comes to television programming. You can't put anything over on them anymore.

I started to work in television for three or four years, in 1954. There was one channel of television, black and white. But it could be entertaining and educational. During the evening they showed important plays, opera or Shakespeare's tragedies.

I'm the first girl to say the word 'period' on television.