Dana Walden Quotes

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.

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.

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

Television is a runaway train that you have to get on for nine months of the year. But at the same time, it has a wonderful immediacy.

It's a really incredible time to be working in television.

In the U.S., there are around 300 shows in different networks, so there's a lot of work here.

There's a great appetite for smart television. Every day I get up and there are interesting stories I want to do.

You don't really have time to watch TV if you work on TV.

I got into television in 1998 when I didn't have a computer or even an email address.

I think in Israel there is so much talent in the TV world because there's less movies done.

In the U.S., HBO is a very aggressive service.

You want to put out a TV show? If you have the money to do it on your own, by yourself, and you have a TV network, you can do it by yourself. But the nature of the beast is, art needs finance. That's how this industry works. So until the Internet becomes our source of entertainment - and watch it, I believe it will - this is how things go.

I came to 20th Century Fox to do movies, and then they started a network, and they asked me to do a show as part of their starting what became the Fox network.

In television you go in with this operating system that it is a crapshoot.

'Banshee' was kind of a lark. I was getting paid pretty well to write movies no one was making - and so I decided to try my hand at TV and get paid much less to actually get something produced.

I developed the pilot for 'Entertainment Tonight' with Jack Haley, Jr. and Al Masini, who became my business partner in 'Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous,' 'Runaway' and several other shows and specials.

You're in the business - when you're a writer, producer, director - to get ratings.

The more shows that are produced, the more writers are hired, producers are hired, actors are hired, directors are hired, it means the more people will get employed. It's better for the economy. It's a fantastic thing.

I spend 80% of my time in my restaurants. Taping my TV shows doesn't take much time, and then they get aired a lot. That's the thing people don't realize.

The best businesses that all of us have in the entertainment business are cable content channels, which have a dual revenue stream.

I've started a company, called Tall Girl Productions, and we've got our first project that is purely producing, not writing, with a writer named Evan Daugherty. It's for NBC, it's called 'Afterthought,' and it's science fiction-ish. That's fun.

'The X-Files,' as I recall, we didn't know really what we were until the middle of the first year. You know, so if we'd been cancelled, you get cancelled before you mature into what it is you can actually be, which is too bad.

Life goes on pretty much the same way. I've been working on a couple of films on the side. You may see some more. You may even see another television show.

I think the biggest issue for legacy media - both TV and film - is that it just costs too much money to develop a TV series or movie. And most of them don't work. Then the one that works has to pay for the rest.

Everybody knows things are not the same. The people running the TV end of a major vertically integrated company know how much money a successful show can make.