Tv Censorship Quotes

You can't cuss on TV. It does hurt your brand if you do stuff like that. That's not what blue chip sponsors are looking for.

On 'Rhoda,' they wanted my husband, Joe, to wear a pajama top when we were doing love scenes. They finally let him take it off as long as the audience saw him get into bed wearing pajama bottoms so they didn't think he was completely naked underneath.

David Steinberg was the reason the Smothers Brothers got cancelled.

TV is a major force in our lives - a FORCE. It must be handled very carefully, both its censure and its artistic honesty.

We're all comedy fans in my family. My parents mainly wouldn't let me watch stuff that was either annoying to them, or just garbage. My dad wouldn't let us watch 'The Flintstones' if he was home, because he said it was a rip-off of 'The Honeymooners'. But he would let us stay up really late in the summer and watch old 'Honeymooners'.

[M*A*S*H] didn't get released by FOX, it escaped.

It was a JOB; the video show was a JOB; you don't tell the Aristocrats joke at 8 o'clock at night on network tv, it would be funny though. But those guys know I like dirty stuff, I like clean stuff too.

You can't say whatever you want on network television.

I was very dirty; I was a very dirty comic. There was no way I would have gotten on TV with the act I had when I first started.

They'll say, That's funny, but you can't do that on TV.

You know what the lowest rated episode we ever had was? Where Captain Kirk kissed Uhuru - a white man kissing an African-American woman. All the stations in the American South - in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana - refused to air it. And so our ratings plummeted.

I think everybody has a point where they're not going to cross that line. There were a couple of things with Comedy Central that we had to fight for. They were pretty cool about everything. I don't think there was anything we really fought for that didn't happen.

My grandfather was a Pentecostal preacher, and there was nothing really modern that went on under their roof. We watched television, but they were very picky about what we could watch - old Westerns and stuff that wasn't vulgar or violent at all.

Norman Lear was talking about everything in the '70s... race, sexism, all of it. The network comedy really stayed away from that in the 1980s and 1990s.

I think it's a blessing that the show [Dracula] is on a network because it forces everyone to use their imaginations and be creative. The power of suggestion comes back. So, in the sex scenes, no one is ever fully naked, but I feel the suggestion is so much sexier.

They're pretty particular about what they show. They certainly edit the scripts and have conversations with the writers about what they are and aren't willing to portray. But the writers and the network are pretty much on the same page.

It's really hard to scare people on network television. You've got to be smart about it. You've got to parcel out the scares.

There are a lot of latchkey kids. I don't want to be sitting there when a guy blurts something out over the TV and have my daughters ask me what those words mean.

You can say "ass," but you can't say "asshole." That's why I always cringe when a character in a TV show refers to someone as an "ass." Unless you're British, calling someone an ass really doesn't work. But those are the rules of television. You can be a dirtbag, but not a scumbag.