quotations about television
Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America -- not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
MARSHALL MCLUHAN
Montreal Gazette, May 16, 1975
I used to think that television could be potentially the most powerful medium for the dissemination of knowledge that the world has ever known, it could be a very rich and rewarding thing if handled properly and that the problem was in the execution. I've now come, after ten years in the business, five years of which was as a television critic, to taking the very extreme view point. I think television itself is bad. The idea of television, the act of watching television kills the imagination. It's not like radio, with radio you had to listen, had to make things, you had to build things in your mind. Movies do that. Television is something else again. Television lays it all out there in a very prescribed way and the bare minimum of imagination on the part of the viewer is needed and I really fear for all of us.
HARLAN ELLISON
interview, 1979
Television is called a medium because so little of it is rare or well done.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Over the past decade, there's been a continual debate about whether TV is, in one sense or another, "the new movies." This lively argument has drowned out another, more fascinating development: scripted television's raiding of literature for devices that it places in service of its own storytelling, then transforms into something that's part literature, part cinema, but ultimately and distinctively television.
MATT ZOLLER SEITZ
"Television's Best Shows Are Taking Their Cues From Literature", Vulture, May 17, 2017
When flat panel TVs became a thing, the comparison to framed art was an easy one to make. I imagined hanging one up on the wall, disguised as a picture frame, then inviting a friend over just to surprise them as that Monet painting suddenly became an episode of SVU.
ALFREDO DIZON
"Samsung's new TV is a literal piece of art to hang on your wall", eParis Extra, May 20, 2017
Networks aren't preaching the mobile revolution, just yet. TV, they argue, is still king.
KERRY FLYNN
"TV networks: Television is still the best, but here's our exclusive Snapchat Shows", Mashable, May 19, 2017
Television is no longer just about ratings, units and GRPs, but rather about the ability to effectively utilize data and technology to target and measure more specific, granular audiences within best-in-class content and an array of alternative distribution formats.
NICK TROIANO
"The Future of Television Is Now", Multichannel News, May 21, 2017
A narrow and distorted picture of America often emerges from the televised news. A single dramatic piece of the mosaic becomes, in the minds of millions, the entire picture.
SPIRO AGNEW
speech the Midwest Republican Regional Conference in Des Moines, Iowa, November 13, 1969
TV has taken reflection out of the human condition. People didn't use to have a ready answer for everything, whether they knew something about it or not. People think they have to have an answer for everything because the guys on TV have an answer for everything. But it's bullsh**t! Reflection is crucial.
ALAN ARKIN
"Alan Arkin: Random Advice from an Older Gentleman", Esquire, February 2013
A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection -- not an invitation for hypnosis.
UMBERTO ECO
"Can Television Teach?", Screen Education, 1979
How can you put out a meaningful drama when every fifteen minutes proceedings are interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits with toilet paper? No dramatic art form should be dictated and controlled by men whose training and instincts are cut of an entirely different cloth. The fact remains that these gentlemen sell consumer goods, not an art form.
ROD SERLING
Rod Serling: Submitted for Your Approval
Dark is the new light, black is the new white, complex is the new simple and weird is the new normal. That's the way television is these days.
PAT STACEY
"New Twin Peaks is just like second season which everyone was baffled by, and quite a few fed up with", The Independent, May 25, 2017
Scripted television is still a very young medium -- lagging a half-century behind cinema and hundreds of years behind the novel and play -- but its evolution in recent times has still been dazzling to watch.
MATT ZOLLER SEITZ
"Television's Best Shows Are Taking Their Cues From Literature", Vulture, May 17, 2017
Television is a wonderful form of entertainment that has only two things wrong with it--the commercials and the programs.
EVAN ESAR
20,000 Quips & Quotes
Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a television set.
RAYMOND CHANDLER
letter to Charles Morton, November 22, 1950
Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home.
DAVID FROST
attributed, A Companion to Television
Opera once was an important social instrument -- especially in Italy. With Rossini and Verdi people were listening to opera together and having the same catharsis with the same story, the same moral dilemmas. They were holding hands in the darkness. That has gone. Now perhaps they are holding hands watching television.
LUCIANO BERIO
London Observer, February 5, 1989
Television is the most effective medium ever. We know it, you know it and our friends in Silicon Valley know it.
LINDA YACCARINO
"How the big TV networks are adapting to ad-skipping viewers ... and Google, Snapchat and Facebook", Los Angeles Times, May 15, 2017
I see a great many things now that I couldn't see when I was a young person. And I don't like everything that I see. For instance, I see people spending about fifty hours a week in front of the tv, which means that they have no more family life, they belong to the crowd, so to speak, they belong to the media, and they have no individual perspective, they derive their observations, they get them ready made from somebody who packages them. I don't think that's a very good thing for anybody.
SAUL BELLOW
Q & A at Howard Community College, February 1986
Life on television is in many ways a schematic of real life. The whole alternate reality that television creates is not a coincidence or a result of random chance. It is the product of the thinking of TV producers and writers about life. We can see reflected on our video screens the attitudes of TV creators. More than that, we can sense the experience and "feel" of a city replicated on television. For what we see on prime-time television is nothing less than the apotheosizing of Los Angeles, and the spreading of the Los Angeles experience across the TV screens of America.
ARTHUR ASA BERGER
Television in Society