The main thing that gives me hope is the media. We have radio, TV, magazines, and books, so we have the possibility of learning from societies that are remote from us, like Somalia. We turn on the TV and see what blew up in Iraq or we see conditions in Afghanistan.
I would not know how I am supposed to feel about many stories if not for the fact that the TV news personalities make sad faces for sad stories and happy faces for happy stories.
I really want to play a superhero. I want to take the role-model thing up a notch. I’ve always been a fan of movies and TV, and to be able to play the ultimate TV superhero would be awesome.
I’m definitely a narcissist, and TV is fabulous for narcissists.
My fitness idol is a sports personality and a young racer, Arman Ibrahim. He is very fit and he was also my partner in the TV show Fear Factor.’
You know when they have a fishing show on TV? They catch the fish and then let it go. They don’t want to eat the fish, they just want to make it late for something.
The problem with my peers is they don’t understand television. You have to work within the confines of what executives will allow you to put on TV. Otherwise, we’ve not done anything, we’ve not really struggled to change the culture at all.
I want to be choosy, because one has to invest a lot of time in TV shows.
When I get on TV, I’m going to be talking about a silly basketball game, and I’m going to be having a lot of fun doing it. But I’m very aware of all the social stuff going on.
I didn’t know if I was going to go into acting more, or kind of lean into TV writing or comedy.
My own musical ambitions were born when I was five, watching the Ed Sullivan Show on TV. When Elvis Presley burst on to the screen, singing ‘Don’t Be Cruel,’ I felt my first sexual thrill, though I didn’t know what it was at the time.
When I got to high school, they had a morning TV show you could become a part of, and I started making short films for that, most little satirical, laugh-y films about the dean of students being chased by a dinosaur or something like that. And I really just enjoyed it.
After twelve years in prison, I think I have listened to the radio maybe 30-40 times in all, and only when I have been without even a TV.
When I was on TV in the ’80s, I wasn’t thinking, ‘There’s a 10-year-old kid watching this and in 15 years, he’s gonna be doing stuff that was influenced by me.’ I was trying to get my five minutes together. So now that those people are comedians and they’re influenced by me – it’s bizarre.
I’m always feeling like I don’t belong, no matter where I am. So I’m just searching for a family nonstop, and sometimes I find it in the mosh pit, sometimes I find it when I’m doing some French TV show with the president’s wife.
I prefer to do movies, just for the simple fact that in TV, there’s not much of a guarantee. They can pull the plug on you.
I never watch MTV. I don’t have time to watch TV. And when I do, I’m watching the Discovery Channel. ‘Deadliest Catch: Crab Fishing in Alaska,’ that’s my show.
But I can only take so much TV, because there is so much advice. I find people will preach about virtually anything – your diet, how to live your life, how to improve your golf. The lot. I have always had a thing against the Mister Know-It-Alls.
I realize I’m a very lucky man. I love what I do, I love films, TV and theater, and the fact that I’m able to make a living at it staggers me.
When I was younger and really interested in acting, I would look at all the women on TV, and even the ones who were supposed to be ‘geeks’ or ‘less attractive,’ they all looked similar because they were extremely attractive and their bodies were all a certain way.
All Oprah needs is a good book. My only request when she’s building any house is, ‘Could I please have a TV in my bedroom?’
I grew up as a huge comic fan and a huge Batman & Robin fan. I watched all the TV shows, went to all the movies – I even had the lunch box; man, I was in!
In writing on the page, you can be a bit elliptical, but on TV, you can’t dance around stuff. You either show it, or you don’t.
I don’t watch a lot of TV anymore. A lot of it isn’t the kind of thing you can feel comfortable with watching with your kids. And I still feel that way even though, now, my kids are in their 30s.
I think socializing on the Internet is to socializing what reality TV is to reality.
I’m thrilled to have a completely new audience that I can get from Court TV, without it being my own trial. That was the only other way I would have gotten it.
Born of the impossibly varied options we have to amuse ourselves, cutting-edge companies are finding innovative ways to tailor our entertainment choices to who we are, relieving us of the burden of finding the diamond in the rough of 500 TV channels or thousands of movies and music albums released every year.
I’ve been waiting for the right opportunity to have a sitcom because I’ve been on TV like 10 times, but it was all reality shows, semi-acting like that.
I don’t think there is a national pasttime. Watching TV is a national pasttime. Really. If there is a national pasttime, it is watching TV.
I’ve always slightly harboured a dream of making a film, a documentary feature. Somehow, I just got into a way of working a routine of making TV docs.
The one function that TV news performs very well is that when there is no news we give it to you with the same emphasis as if it were.
Still, most of those effects occur in the context of harmless play and it is patently obvious that children are not normally turned into aggressive little monsters by TV or video games, since most children do not become aggressive little monsters.
For me, personally, I didn’t see many people like me on TV growing up.
Well, whether it’s on film or on TV, you don’t want to throw too many curves at your audio and video guys.
Shah Rukh Khan started his career with television, and now he is a superstar. You can’t generalise and say that TV actors can’t make it to films.
Reality TV to me is the museum of social decay.
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.
By the time I started doing TV and film, I was in my forties, so I wasn’t going to do the young up-and-comer.
I know that I’m a quirky guy, to say the least. I don’t know how easy I am to cast for a network. It hasn’t been because I haven’t tried. But am I dying to be on a TV show? No.
I don’t mind what people say about me as long as it’s an opinion or the truth. If someone says, ‘He’s the worst comedian in the world,’ that’s fine. If someone says, ‘His face makes me want to punch the TV,’ that’s fine. But if they say, ‘Oh, and I know for a fact he hunts squirrels,’ I go: no, no, no… that’s a lie.
There’s a good deal in common between the mind’s eye and the TV screen, and though the TV set has all too often been the boobtube, it could be, it can be, the box of dreams.
On a movie set, there’s so much down time, adjusting the lighting. It gave me time to nap, call my friends, relax, work out. But with TV, there’s no break time. None.
In Britain you’re more used to challenging drama. In America, TV is just boring, and numbing, and bloody terrible.
Only one of us would usually sing lead. Which most of the time was, Mickey or Dave. They thought it was perfectly a natural routine, because Mickey and Dave saw themselves as TV actors.
A lot of TV people buy more than one of an item, in case they spot or stain it, but I don’t like buying duplicates – it’s wasteful.
A lot of people will center their living room around a TV. I personally think that’s the wrong decision. I mean, have it there, absolutely. But to walk in and clearly see that the sole focus of any time you have in your house is that TV?
You never know in TV – sometimes you’re on at the wrong time at the wrong place. Sometimes you don’t get a chance to catch on.
Nobody’s tuning in – let’s check the TV Guide listings and see what game Joe Buck is calling. Nobody cares. They want to see the Cubs. They want to see the Packers. They want to see the Cowboys. They don’t care who’s calling the game.
I’m a conservative. I voted for Donald Trump and back in 2016 everybody was talking about, ‘Oh my God, here’s another TV character trying to run for the presidency.’ They didn’t really take him seriously.
Emotionally, I am attached to TV because it has given me my bread and butter.
For me, my guilty pleasure is that if I don’t want to do anything one day, I won’t. I’ll just sit around, not shower, hardly even eat, and just watch TV.
The only other thing that’s like video games for me is watching tennis on TV. I can have it on, and there’s a rhythmic quality to it – I can be watching Wimbledon or the U.S. Open and still be working.
When I found out that I had won the MacArthur Fellowship, I had been a professor at Carnegie Mellon for a week. I probably shouldn’t be saying this on TV, but I stopped worrying about tenure.
I think the thing we see is that as people are using video games more, they tend to watch passive TV a bit less. And so using the PC for the Internet, playing video games, is starting to cut into the rather unbelievable amount of time people spend watching TV.
