Nicky Whelan Quotes

I am currently talking to one of the studios about making American Star as a TV series.

I have a new television show in the works, and that is all I can say right now.

I believe that 99 percent of successful TV shows change an immense amount from the pilot to the tenth or twelfth episode.

It's rare to get a part in a show that's greenlit, let alone two shows that have been greenlit.

In television, things move quite slowly. It can take years to get a show off the ground.

If you go to pilot then you are probably going to go to series. That's my feeling about it.

Developing a series is a next step for me.

Television and movies just take so long. If you pitch a show or develop a project, it can be a year before your show even gets on the air, if it gets picked up.

'Game of Thrones' is shot on a very similar kind of schedule to a TV show, but there's a lot more time and focus put into the script.

I don't know much about writing a show or being a show-runner on a show, but I can only imagine that when you first cast a show and you first do a pilot, there are so many components that you're throwing into the mix and you're not sure how they're going to develop.

I think it's not uncommon for new television shows to spend certainly the first year, but without a doubt, like, the first eight or ten episodes, kind of figuring out what the show is.

I had done a directing producing job before on 'Big Day' and 'Jake in Progress,' and those are two shows where I directed the pilot and stayed with it in series.

If you're doing an hour-long show, you're working movie hours, doing a 12-15-hour day. We work three or four hours a day, and get every third or fourth week off to give the writers time to write. It's the cushiest job in Hollywood.

It's actually much harder to develop a TV show than I had anticipated.

As I slowly managed to take what I had learned into a transition from contestant to announcer and warm-up, I first had to prove myself on pilots. And as you know, many pilots are taped for each show that is lucky enough to breakthrough to being a series.

The most important decision you can make as a showrunner when you're doing a pilot is who's in it and who's directing it.

Jeff Wachtel, who was the main reason our show came back, and also got picked up to begin with, is from the New York theater.

What I do know is how difficult it is in this industry to get a show on the air. There's so many different stages: getting a script bought by the network, then getting a pilot made and having that pilot go to series, and then, when that series gets on the air, having people watch it.

When you make a pilot, you've never seen the show before; you don't know what it is.

TV is a hard thing to do. It's a hard thing to get a show.

I could sell my own TV show, but I couldn't get it made.

I had 'Breaking In' at Fox, and that was a constant stopping and starting of getting canceled and picked up again.

Normally we go in, we do a series and then that's it, we're axed!

Working in MTV's development team, my days would consist of pitches and deciding which concepts we wanted to buy. We would then develop those into a pilot. Very few ended up making it to a full series, but if they did, I would manage the project alongside the show's creators.

In ten episodes, we were able to do our writers' room first. We did that all summer and wrote for 15 weeks and got everything in really good shape.