Television Format Quotes

TV is designed a certain way where you have three, four days on stage and three or four days out. You're basically making a feature every seven days. You have to shoot an hour's worth.

A successful current affairs television show seems to be more and more a cross between a music hall turn and a scene in a torture chamber.

I'm disappointed in television. I'm disappointed first of all in the audience that will not let stories be told in longer form.

You don't really have time to do other than what's written. It's very rigid. Shows have a certain rhythm that nobody wants disturbed. So a lot of that doesn't take place on television, at least the television I was doing at the time when I first started.

Pointless' - I think it's probably the greatest daytime TV show that has ever existed.

The 'Road Rules' thing was just something that happened. It was never like when I was little I said, 'I want to be on a reality show when I grow up.' They didn't even have them then, you know?

I'd like to do more TV; TV is completely different than working in movies in a lot of ways, it's like making a really compact movie. Because you don't have as much time, especially hour long shows, they move so quickly.

'Wings' was a blessing, but it was also very difficult. Whenever you do situation comedy, no matter how excellent the execution - and we had a great cast and great writers - but the format is somewhat limited.

Frankly, with HBO and Showtime and cable shows, the DVD box sets and all, you can have a product that doesn't make you feel like as soon as it's projected, it's thrown away. It's really a piece of art.

It feels as though, with all of these cable series or Internet shows or limited series events that are only 10 or 13 episodes... the quality is really rising.

I created 'Dinner: Impossible' with a guy named Bryan O'Reilly and I shot the pilot as a 30 minute show and we sold it.

Doing a TV show is different because it's more of a TV version of something. A more focused take on things.

I actually think film and TV are sort of the same thing now. To me they're all motion pictures. There's a camera, a script, other actors and a director. Doing a sitcom is a little different. It's kind of a hybrid, half movie, half play, presented in a proscenium fashion - the camera's on one side of the line, the set on the other, the audience sitting behind the cameras.

I think the sitcom is the format for television. It's the essential form, and it represents more of the canon of TV, which is why I latched onto it.

We'd become lazy with 'Top Gear,' doing six or seven shows a series.

I kind of love that British style: two seasons of tight, compact, good television. The more episodes you have, the thinner the episodes get.

I think the good thing about 'Take Me Out', which is kind of a compliment to us really, is that when it started doing well round about the second series and people started getting into it, all of a sudden every time you turned over a channel there's a new dating show on.

Strictly' is the most successful reality format in the world - it's in the 'Guinness Book of Records' - going to 38 countries. 'X Factor' hasn't done that.

In television, the writer-creator-showrunner is embraced as the creative mind.

One of my previous incarnations is as a question writer, so I'd worked on shows like 'The Weakest Link' and a couple of very short-lived ITV series.

It's hard to fit everything in and still have episodic television.

I actually worked on the pilot of 'The Chase' and wrote the questions on it.

When you limit the length of the video to something under two minutes, it gives everyday people an opportunity to make something entertaining. It's harder to tell a story or create an entertaining piece of content that is based around the time slot model, television shows being 22 minutes long.

I don't call four hours a miniseries.

That's the definition of a mini-series. A mini-series is a show that has no continuing story or narrative elements between one group of episodes and another, so no, I wasn't surprised.