Tom Shales Quotes

Web media needs to move to TV metaphor - with full-screen imagery and other content interrupted with full-screen ads.

I don't really watch television, and I don't watch these shows that promote shows.

The sheer density of advertising creates a psychic mass, an overlay that can sometimes be very tense or aggressive. As a citizen, you have to participate in that every day. You have to walk by until it's changed.

I've done a dozen or two dozen infomercials.

People have said that I said I hate television. I never did say that. What I said was that I hated a lot of stuff that was on television. It's nothing about the medium itself.

Grunge was so self-consciously lowbrow and nonaspirational that it seemed, at first, impervious to the hype and glamour normally applied swiftly to any emerging trend. But sure enough, grunge anthems found their way onto the soundtracks of television commercials, and Dodge Neons were hawked by kids in flannel shirts saying, 'Whatever.'

I think TV is the only place left where you can have a midsize something.

The forced influence of advertising has given us completely useless TV. You don't want that on the Net. But most on-line information providers need to attract advertising - which slows download times and clutters the screen with windows.

Ads shouldn't be in people's way.

I did all the Chef Boyardee commercials, in America, when I was young.

The homes of America are horrified and the intelligence of Americans is insulted by weird television advertising by which this Administration threatens the end of the world unless all-wise Lyndon is given the nation for his very own.

TV is a level playing field, and you're competing for eyeballs.

We're not doing brain surgery. We're not saving lives... Even if you're doing Shakespeare, it's still entertainment. We're just entertaining people. We're just doing the stuff that comes on in between the ads.

There was a time when I never would have considered, ever, doing television commercials for records. I would never do that. That was something that you did for K-Mart.

There's so much advertising on television that I find just lazy, just so lazy. I'm like, 'Why are they doing that?'

I hate how on TV they have to fill so many minutes. It means they have to put in anything, and by doing so they sort of trivialize news; news becomes this commodity that they need to fill dead time between commercials with.

I remember when I first came to America and I saw posters for TV shows and I was like, "What?! Why does a television show deserve space on a billboard?"

I'd hate to say, if I wasn't running, the television networks would be doing less than half the business.

I like alternating commercials with movies, because it keeps the pace up. You can't slack on a commercial. You need to go fast. That's a terrific piece of action, I think if that was scheduled for a movie, you'd put that in for two or three days worth of work.

If you're going to be in a series and it has commercial breaks... People say, "Oh, there's a difference between cable and network," and my response to that is, "No, there's a difference between sponsored and not sponsored." That's the thing.

To televisionize any serious problem, the program directors face the task of making the message 'go down smooth' until the audience is delivered to the commercial.

The first ads for medical marijuana have started airing on television in California. The ads are quite expensive. It costs a lot of money to buy 30 seconds during 'Spongebob Squarepants.'

We live in a world in which the only utopian visions arrive in commercial breaks: magical visions of an impossibly hospitable world, peopled by bright-eyed attractive men, women, children... Where nobody dies... In my worlds people died. And I thought that was honest. I thought I was being honest.

It's amazing how many people you see on TV. I did my first television show a month ago, and the next day five million television sets were sold. The people who couldn't sell theirs threw them away.

[Commercial radio] is owned by one or two corporations now, and they're not in the music business. They're in the advertising business.... So let's not kid ourselves. If you want to hear music, go buy a guitar.