Television Narrative Quotes

What's gratifying about West Wing is that everybody told us that it couldn't be done - that the man or woman on the street didn't care about politics. But if you set things up correctly, people don't have a problem with it.

American television is very much created by the writers, just the volume of it. The writers are so key. You're just trying to do something that serves that script. And in general, film isn't all about the script, really.

Doing a TV show is different because it's more of a TV version of something. A more focused take on things.

If there is a tendency in modern television I hate, it is the unstoppable march of the dramatic reconstruction to tell the stories of anything from an ancient Egyptian battle to the early life of Paul Gascoigne.

I want to remind people that there is no soundtrack in 'Southland;' there is no scored music or soundtrack telling you what you're supposed to feel.

In an age where television is viewed as the best medium to 'tell stories,' narrative often stands in for substance on would-be prestige shows.

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 think American television changed world television in its reinvention of the series.

As a matter of fact - it'll probably ruin my movie career - but I think better storytellers are in television.

More and more of our finest actors are finding room for themselves in the world of television - but I truly believe it's because some of the best stories are being told there.

I think that the dramas that you find in TV are actually a lot more interesting, typically, than what you find in cinema.

I had a hard time on TV, the last time on television, so I wasn't sure that I wanted to do that again. But, I really am a big fan of Jenji and I knew this is her next thing, so I read it. And once I read the script, I was really, really impressed that there was a woman who was the centerpiece of her own story, and that she was in the center of her own narrative.

The preferred world can be seen any evening on television in the succession of programs where the good always wins

Television can take anything. It can take the most exaggerated of storytelling forms.

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.