Programming Decisions Quotes

Sometimes it's hard to know why networks will stick with something. Sometimes the ratings won't happen, but there's excitement at the network, so they'll stay with the show.

You know, dramas are much more expensive to do than say a comedy, so any kind of deficit like that is picked up on when it comes time for them to pick up new shows.

If you've got a restaurant, you definitely want the line to be out the door the first night, but you're more interested in people continuing to come to the restaurant. And that's their outlook, a little bit. I think it allows for more creativity, in the process. It allows people to make interesting programming that maybe wouldn't have a place on broadcast networks, if you were just counting people.

It's really difficult to have a challenging male-driven show, and certain networks take off because they have their own mandate about what they want to do.

To understand this whole area, you have to stop thinking like a viewer and start thinking like a network programming exec.

If I owned a network, I would never let a guy just put people on without telling me who they are.

I wouldn't be comfy going toe to toe launching a new scripted show against broadcast.

Back in 1975, we were making all the decisions about what people were going to watch.

The development process is not that simple... When I started working at Fox in '92, the company had decided that dramas were dead: they weren't viable businesses and because newsmagazines were so efficient to produce and financially so much more tolerable than a drama. So that year, our company developed very few dramas.

I mean its a weekly occurrence that somebody will complain that Top Gear was on last night - and you just sit back and wait for the complaints. But if you start to pay attention to everyones concerns, you end up with something bland and boring. So you sort of have to ignore everybody in order to do the show how we want to do it.

Perhaps storytellers don't need to care as much about the future as executives and investors do. After all, isn't it possible that technology will enable storytellers to connect directly to their audience without the need for anyone to share the programming decisions or the profit in between? Don't bet on it.

With the social media phenomenon, where people's opinions inform so much of what we do with our lives, where the number of 'likes' decides what we should program, I cringe.

When you take the individual out of the equation, then you're making programming based on some marketer's idea of what will sell, and not based on the idea of what an individual would like.

I try to make the songs as good as I can - the way I like it, you know? And I guess my taste sometimes happens to be what other people, particularly radio programmers, like too.

I have very strong views on TV. There's no diversity, there's no choice. Things are decided by committee.

There are so many conditions to programming in America, where it's dominated by these people that own 800 radio stations that have no idea who to play and who not to play, and they listen to somebody or read somebody else's programming sheet and go by Buck Owens' opinion or something. Eight hundred stations are controlled by some guy that doesn't have a clue as to what to do about music.

I think every theater in America wants a younger audience... and you can't just hope to have a younger audience, you have to program things that audience is going to connect with.

I don't understand executives that pit women against each other, the fact that they brought in 'Body of Proof,' Dana Delaney is a friend of mine, and the two of us were just rolling our eyes, it's like, of course, you finally have two great female leads and you're going to put us on against each other.

We end the show with something that's never been on TV because it was too big for a sketch but we couldn't stretch it out to make a whole episode because it would have been too long, but we always thought it was really good.

We make programming decisions on a day-to-day basis. We sell advertising on a day-to-day basis. This is the way networks operate. This is the way all television stations operate. This is the way most businesses operate when you have a number of affiliates or a number of franchises. It's the way the business operates.

Don't be deluded into believing that the titular heads of the networks control what appears on their networks. They all have better taste.

Television executives only commission something that somebody else has already commissioned that's doing well on another station - they're afraid of expecting an audience to concentrate for longer than three minutes on any particular item.