"Television used to be a quantity business. They created around thirty I Love Lucys a year, and Milton Berle just walked onstage in a dress every week and everyone fell over laughing, because their minds were so completely blown by what was happening. The production values were entirely secondary. "Did you see the flimsy set shake back and forth when Ricky slammed the door?" "Who cares? I'm watching this show inside my house!" Stories were new, characters were fresh, stereotypes not yet created. Everything was new and juicy and fifty million people were watching. Television is not about quantity anymore; it's very much about quality—and specificity. It's a giant beautiful smorgasbord of fiction, nonfiction, comedy, and drama—about every conceivable subject—delivered to the consumer at low cost and with nearly maximal convenience. It is also dissected, analyzed, and reported on with alarming speed by professional and amateur critics alike, who have at their disposal an online database of every single thing that has ever happened in the history of screen-based entertainment for comparison. Maximal speed, maximal scrutiny, maximal convenience, and maximal skepticism in the viewing audience that it's going to be worth their time investment."
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Original Language: English
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Sources
Mike Schur in Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers by Mike Sacks: Penguin Books (2014), pp. 44-45.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Television
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Television
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