Television Syndication Quotes

As far as the future for the Showtime episodes that have already aired, we are sold into syndication so we'll be appearing primarily on the Fox syndicated networks and then eventually the SCI FI Channel. So, we'll be around for a while.

When I was a kid in the U.S., 'Doctor Who' wasn't really on, but you would occasionally catch an episode. Different stations did marathons.

'Mad Men' was one of the first shows where Netflix was the first syndication window.

When we made 'Fireball XL5', I'd never heard of NBC, and I didn't even know what American networks were. I knew that it would be wonderful if the show was successful in America, but I knew nothing about the American networks.

I wanted to prove that I could play something else, but there were 249 episodes out there of 'Mayberry,' and it was aired every day. It was hard to escape.

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

I am a creator of TV shows. 'Lifestyle' ran for 14 years... that was pleasurable. We also had 'Runaway' for eight years. We did two years of a show called 'The Start of Something Big', and we did a network series called 'Fame, Fortune and Romance.'

Some people have made a fortune by being employed. Jerry Bruckheimer does not own his content. Warner Bros. owns his shows. They are on CBS, and he makes a fortune.

I've been on my share of network dramas and comedies, and the problem sometimes in a network is they have a single-minded focus on making the show true to whatever genre it is. If you're on a drama, it better be procedural, it better fulfill all the demands of a procedural show, and you better keep those episodes independent, so if I'm watching the show in seven years as its syndicated on some other cable network, I don't have to know what happened before or after the episode. If you're on a comedy, everything has to be funny and wacky and zany.

One of the things that's driving films in a particular direction is that the after market value of them is dropping really fast and in many segments of it, not just DVDs. Pay television is dropping.

The economics of television syndication and DVD sales mean that there's a tremendous financial pressure to make programs that can be watched multiple times, revealing new nuances and shadings on the third viewing. Meanwhile, the Web has created a forum for annotation and commentary that allows more complicated shows to prosper, thanks to the fan sites where each episode of shows like 'Lost' or 'Alias' is dissected with an intensity usually reserved for Talmud scholars.