Tv Business Quotes

The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason. There's also a negative side.

Dragons' Den' is about as close to real business as you can get on television.

I started out as a musician. Although I always wanted to have a dual career, I fell into the TV and movie business more strongly and more quickly.

The music business looks like, you know, innocent schoolboys compared to the TV business. They care about nothing but profit.

The television business is actually going through a tremendous transition, but I think at the end of the day, television is still paramount.

Most of TV works this way: You try to get something up and running, and once you do, you just try to keep it going, because there's a lot of money involved.

TV is a big business. In some ways, it's surpassed films, in terms of the way people invest in these shows and invest in these characters, and give up so much of their time to follow these people's stories.

I don't think a show's ever changed networks in the middle of the season before, but it was cool because they gave us those extra couple years of life that was necessary to get us to syndication.

I wanted to be involved in TV and film in some capacity, so a compromise, because acting seemed unrealistic, and so risky, was to get into the production side. And it was a really fortunate, smart move looking back on it, because it gave me perspective on another side of the business.

People have outs for numbers of episodes, usually, written into their contract. Some studios will say, "We're going to let Julia Louis-Dreyfus off of Veep to do three episodes, but not three episodes of the same show." But, that's all business affairs, so I'm talking over my head here.

The development process is not that simple... When I started working at Fox in '92, the company had decided that dramas were dead: they weren't viable businesses and because newsmagazines were so efficient to produce and financially so much more tolerable than a drama. So that year, our company developed very few dramas.

I learned a lot from Dick Wolf. I'll always remember playing that character because it was such a good character. It was great to be able to be a character like that for television. I think the thing that I'll bring from the whole experience, the whole 10 years, is I had never been interested in the television business before.

Making good television is what Simon Cowell does. That's his business.

The thing about TV is it's a meritocracy. I love that aspect of it - and I've had shows that have gone on the air and been canceled. I've seen the good and the bad of it.

The threat to free television. The reason television is free is because it is a life support system for commercials. That fundamental aspect is about to change.

I came back to Philips and quickly realised that the TV business had a major performance issue and some structural challenges. Rather than try to tweak it and sit things out, we said we had to go for a structural solution.

In 1995, I had been chosen to make a short presentation about the state of the TV business at a company retreat in Santa Barbara. At the time, I felt we were not real competitors in network television. The studio wasn't prolific; we didn't have much of a brand.

Pay-TV companies that built their businesses on the backs of local and network broadcast signals should pay a fair price for access to that high-value programming.

The way they do things in the U.S., if you have a show, you'll option your actors for five, six or seven seasons. In the U.K., we just don't have the financing to be able to do that.

Anybody who really knows about the TV business knows that it would be impossible to just march in one day and say to your colleagues and bosses, 'Oh yes, I'm hosting my own show.'

The theater business has allowed me, in a way the movie and TV business has not, to do very, very interesting work. So that's what I do.

I've heard that George Clooney did something like nine pilots before 'ER' was picked up, way back when he was doing TV. It's just the way the business works. There are a lot of pilots that we've never seen. It's protocol.

TV is an interesting business. You audition with a couple of little papers in your hand, and if you're lucky, you get to say those lines in the show. Then, once in a while, you get to do more.

It's always bittersweet when you have a show that you own, that's against you. It's against one of our favorite comedies for NBC. And yes, that's part of the business model. House was on the Fox network for a number of years and was such a great business for the NBC-owned studio. That's part of what we're also trying to build. Hopefully, Mindy will help do that for us.

There’s not a single question about television that can’t be answered in one word: money.