I think good-looking people seldom make good television. And American television studios almost concede before they start: 'Well, it won't be good, but at least it'll be good-looking. We'll have nice-looking girls in tight shirts with F.B.I. badges and fit-looking guys with lots of hair gel vaulting over things.'
Generally, I am losing faith in telly, as we do have good dramas but not as many as there should be.
The quality of TV drama nowadays is getting better and better. They've had to invent a new term for it: 'high-end television.'
Well, certainly I think American television is - that's proper TV.
I believe what makes great television is wanting to watch particular characters.
Over the years, TV has gotten so much better, especially with the advent of cable. The bar has been raised. I think HBO really set the standard with 'The Sopranos,' and then on mainstream TV, shows like 'Lost' broke amazing ground.
The quality of TV, I think, is at an all-time high. The problem with it is the way that we end up consuming it - generally a cable box. A satellite receiver is, to me, nothing more than a glorified VCR.
The difficulty with American television is it's pot luck.
TV is a wasteland. It's a bunch of news actors that read off a prompter.
AMC is a fantastic network that does diverse programming, and does it at a really good level and of great quality.
'Mad Men' was really my first television role, and it never feels like TV to me. It's done at such a high level.
I think TV is all about caring, and if you don't care about a character in a drama or a person when they get voted out of a reality show, it's bad TV. I wouldn't care if you dropped a bomb on the 'Big Brother' house.
Our mantra is that 90 percent of all television is bad, and ten percent has never been better. We make fun of that 90 percent.
English television from the Fifties to the Nineties was the least bad in the world, and now it's just as bad as it is anywhere.
Before I started on 'Borgen', people introduced me to some great American box-sets to convince me that TV could be good. I now watch them all the time. Amy Poehler is very funny in 'Parks and Recreation' and 'In Treatment,' with Gabriel Byrne, is also really good.
What Americans don't care much about is the piffle we put on TV these days, what they don't care about is boring, irrelevant, badly told stories, and what they really hate is the presumption that they're too stupid to know the difference.
I hate it when people talk about Buffy as being campy... I hate camp, I don't enjoy dumb TV. I believe Aaron Spelling has single-handedly lowered SAT scores.
My TV ain't HD, that's too real
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 think what makes a good show is obviously a rabid fan base.
I used to watch 'The Bachelor,' but it's lost my interest now. The reality shows are getting worse and worse. They're out of control and have been for some time.
Good TV is not just TV about good behavior.
I found that the quality of TV material that came to me was so great and was just often better than the film material I got. And when I find a good movie that I really like, I jump on it because it's exciting to do.
I think 'Greenleaf' has taken television up a notch all the way across the boards - from wardrobe and everything.
A big reason why I'm not a big TV watcher is that in my formative years as a viewer, there wasn't that much great television on, or at least, television that appealed to me.
