Show Survival Quotes

Networks decide who will have a chance to do shows, but it is the viewers who make the final decision of who stays and who goes. I am very fortunate, in that the television viewers of our country have decided that Bob Barker can stay.

One of the reasons I think Dark Shadows still runs is that it's dependent on nothing else other than a story.

When you're on a long running series, you reach a very rarefied, high oxygen area and after a while to keep a show on the air they have to make some very drastic changes.

You have to fight to get your show not only on the air but then to keep it what it is and make sure that it doesn't get manipulated into something else.

A lot of sitcoms don't last more than four series. You could say it's mystic.

When you start a TV show, you're not necessarily thinking, "Are we setting up what we need for season seven?" You're just trying to stay on the air, and you try to learn your job as you go, and do what you can.

Year Two is a critical year for any television show.

When we started, we knew the show was going to be hit or miss, and we needed to find a core audience to really make us survive. And I think we've been able to do that.

Ratings experts say the best way to get people to watch during sweeps is to leave the audience with a question that won't be answered until the next time the show is on. You know, like Who shot J.R.? I like to think I do this every night - the question is, Is this show still on?

I think the idea that television has evolved to this place of real thematic richness and the fact that you no longer have to get 10 million people to watch your show in order to propagate its survival are the best things that have ever happened to storytelling in this medium.

A show that's been successful that been on a while, chances are it's going to stay that way. At least it's going to maintain some kind of standard. But when a show begins, there's no telling. Even after 13 shows or a whole year, you don't know what will become of it.

It was the first thing I learned when I started. An old boss said to me, 'Your job is to reflect interest, not to create it.' And what I've taken from that is, if you're not talking about things people are interested in, then they're going to find someone who is. It's not any more complicated than that. But if you forget it, you won't have a show for very long.

I've always said that it's like being the winner of three separate lottery tickets - getting a pilot, getting the pilot picked up, and having a show that actually lasts.

'All in the Family' took ten weeks to take off in 1971, and we were lucky to start in January, because if it had started in the regular fall season of 1970, I don't know if we would have lasted. The ratings didn't take off until the end of that fall season, when the other two networks ran out of fresh shows.

Over the course of television's history, I think fans have done more to save shows and support them than ruin them.

I've never believed that 'Idol' as a franchise is beholden to any individual because everybody said it would die the minute Simon Cowell left, and it hasn't.

I don't think anyone connected with Five-O believed the show would last as long as it did.

One of the tricks that you have to learn, with episodic TV, is you don't know how many years you're going to be blessed with.

Everyone knew this was the episode that was going to make or break the season.

Pilot season in L.A. is just this blood bath. They make so many pilots, and such a small percentage are picked up. And then if you are picked up, there are so many variables. You have to get a good time slot, and you have to get promoted. And then you have to thrive in that time slot.

In the era of networks only, I cannot tell you the number of shows that we don't know about that did not survive. They got canceled. But there are a few that survived by accident, because they didn't have anything else to do, and they stayed with it.