TV Development Quotes

It's actually much harder to develop a TV show than I had anticipated.

Viewers can't expect TV to keep developing unless they make their wants known. And let's face it. The best way to make your wants known in this world is by 'beefing'.

Producer Michael Davies - who did 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire' - offered me a TV show, but I turned it down. I wasn't negotiating: It just didn't sound like a good idea. Then he offered me another show, and I said, 'No thanks' again. When I heard about 'Win Ben Stein's Money,' I thought, 'OK, that sounds like a good idea.'

I'm interested in producing more TV shows.

It's quite common for a television show to start off as one thing and end up as something completely different. There are so many cooks in the kitchen - the network, the studio.

It might be hard to remember this far back, but once upon a time, some of us hoped that public TV would develop into a smart, sophisticated, civilized alternative to commercial TV - not a cheap imitation of it.

I knew 'True Detective' wasn't something I could allow anyone else to develop. But by the time HBO expressed an interest, I still had no real experience.

The directors you want to work with are in the television world.

I started working in the mid-to-late Seventies, when television was not what it is now.

I came up during the formative years of TV.

Television's grown up a lot. It's a little more adult, which I think is a good thing. It allows actors to tell more complex stories. I'm happy to see where it ends up.

I ran development and programming at Disney TV animation. We did a lot of cartoons.

You don't know what the country is ready for unless you're pushing that envelope, and I was told that I couldn't develop 'Will and Grace'.

Working in MTV's development team, my days would consist of pitches and deciding which concepts we wanted to buy. We would then develop those into a pilot. Very few ended up making it to a full series, but if they did, I would manage the project alongside the show's creators.

There are no real guidelines or maps in Australia as to how to write a show, whereas in Hollywood it's where the TV industry is created and there's a lot of work that goes into development.

As I start to think about what I want to do next, there are eight or nine networks I would be thrilled to work with. I remember developing at FX and the executives there telling me, 'We don't want to do shows that 20 million people kind of like; we want to do the show that 2 million people really like.' That's such a refreshing thing to hear.

We're really fleshing out the whole world of the show [Difficult People]. It's more of an ensemble now, whereas last season we were very focused on establishing the Billy/Julie friendship. Now that that's been established, we don't question that they love each other and what the show's about. So we can meander outside of that.

I've been approached in the past to option my stories for television, but prior to Evergreen, there were no assurances the production would be filmed in Alaska.

Early episodes of TV I compare to out-of-town plays. You can make them better. You don't have all the time in the world, but you have time to make them better and improve them as you go along.

Making a show is such a long process. You go through a TV production house that will commission scripts, and if they like what you've written, they take it to a network and sell it to them. It has always felt very far away from something that's actually real.