Show Longevity Quotes

Sometimes when I watch a TV season, your favorite shows die quickly. And then sometimes it's not your favorite, and they live on for 12 years.

The Simpsons can go anywhere in the world and not worry about any budgetary issues. However, even when the show has had its run, I think the characters can go on in perpetuity.

That's another reason I did Daredevil: I didn't get killed off in it.

The same issue is happening on a show like Everybody Loves Raymond now, which is in its eighth year and struggling to come up with good stories. It'll be interesting to see how they do. The bottom line is, it starts with the writers and ends with the writers.

I think a challenge with every sitcom is, how do you maintain things that people are attached to without becoming so reiterative that it just feels like you're sort of watching a reenactment of previous episodes?

So many articles said, ''China Beach' is uncancellable,' but when they dragged it on, I started to have doubts.

NBC gives comedies a chance to find their legs.

'The Sopranos' all came down to the writing. I wouldn't have been on for as long as I was if the writing weren't so good.

I firmly believe, only because I've been doing this for so long, every show takes three years. 90% of them don't get three years. It just does. It takes a long time to build a community, build a friendship with your characters. It's hard for people to grasp on and make them care about you.

It's hard to be a breakout show and stay on top. We're like the flagship show over here.

I was sad when the show [Defiance] got canceled. It was heartbreaking for all of us involved. It was definitely a project that everyone involved poured their heart and soul into. But we had three good years, which is, you know, three more years than most shows get.

I don't think a show's ever changed networks in the middle of the season before, but it was cool because they gave us those extra couple years of life that was necessary to get us to syndication.

When 'Supernatural' came out, there were a lot of procedurals and you were either a doctor or a cop or lawyer, otherwise the show didn't stay on TV. And then we came around, and I don't want to say we were trailblazers, but we found our niche.

That's why, when Alias came along, I knew I'd be OK if the show was on for five or six years because the writing was so good and the creative team was so strong.

People say, 'How can you stay in a play for a long time?' I say, 'The audience is never the same.'

A show needs time to find an audience, and they're very quick to pull them off the air now.

Arrested Development never felt safe. Even the first season, we did thirteen episodes, and we thought we'd never do a back nine. So I never thought in a million years we'd get to make three seasons. I was happy we got that far. I thought it was really good, and I'm really proud of it. I don't think we made a bad episode.

Hosting a TV show is a full-time job in which success is defined by it never ending.

I think the tone of the show has certainly changed over the years, because it's really, really hard to do something different when you have a show going on as long as this has.

A typical TV show is always about protecting the franchise - it's all about stretching it out as long as you can take it. And it's about taking the characters in any given hour as far as you can take them, but then resetting them more or less back to zero so at the beginning of the next week, so they're still the character you know and love.

I've never been on a TV show for more than a season and you have to continually keep it interesting and you have to keep it connected, even as you change.

I think this show can have legs for a long time. That's why it's called 'Beverly Hills 90210' instead of something like 'West Beverly High.'

Kids kill a show! It's, like, a fun concept when the character is pregnant, but then if a show runs for a while, I'm sorry, but it gets annoying when it starts to talk. You get a child actor in there, and unless that child actor is freakin' awesome, it's going to be annoying.

You hope for that with anything, but with a TV show, the writer and the actor being the right mix are more important than the actual writing of the pilot because you hope it's something that can have a long life.

Ethel Merman would stay with a show for years and tour with it. So would Mary Martin, the great stars. They recognized the value of that success and nurtured it. Now, you come from Hollywood, you play 12 weeks and go away. I don't think that's the best policy.