Television

"That is why it lends itself to manipulation of “public opinion,” as politicians and special interest groups as well as advertisers know and will pay millions of dollars to catch you in that state of receptive unawareness. They want their thoughts to become your thoughts, and usually they succeed. So when watching television, the tendency is for you to fall below thought, not rise above it. Television has this in common with alcohol and certain other drugs. While it provides some relief from your mind, you again pay a high price: loss of consciousness. Like those drugs, it too has a strong addictive quality. You reach for the remote control to switch off and instead find yourself going through all the channels. Half an hour or an hour later, you are still watching, still going through the channels. The off button is the only one your finger seems unable to press. You are still watching, usually not because anything of interest has caught your attention, but precisely because there is nothing of interest to watch. Once you are hooked, the more trivial, the more meaningless, it is, the more addictive it becomes. p. 139"

"Watching violence in movies or in TV programs stimulates the spectators to imitate what they see much more than if seen live or on TV news. In movies, violence is filmed with perfect illumination, spectacular scenery, and in slow motion, making it even romantic. However, in the news, the public has a much better perception of how horrible violence can be, and it is used with objectives that do not exist in the movies."

"To get a prime time show - network show - on the air and to keep it there, you must attract and hold a minimum of 18 million people every week. You have to do that in order to move people away from Gomer Pyle, Bonanza, Beverly Hill Billies and so on. And we tried to do this with entertainment, action, adventure, conflict and so on. But once we got on the air, and within the limits of those accident ratio limits, we did not accept the myth, that the television audience has an infantile mind. We had an idea, and we had a premise, and we still believe that. As a matter of fact we decided to risk the whole show on that premise. We believed that the often ridiculed mass audience is sick of this world's petty nationalism and all its old ways and old hatreds, and that people are not only willing but anxious to think beyond most petty beliefs that have for so long kept mankind divided. So you see that the formula, the magic ingredient that many people keep seeking and many of them keep missing is really not in Star Trek. It is in the audience. There is an intelligent life form out on the other side of that television too."

"Watching television is the favorite leisure activity or rather nonactivity for millions of people around the world. The average American, by the time he is sixty years old, will have spent fifteen years staring at the TV screen. In many other countries the figures are similar. Many people find watching TV “relaxing.” Observe yourself closely and you will find that the longer the screen remains the focus of your attention, the more your thought activity becomes suspended, and for long periods you are watching the talk show, game show, sitcom, or even commercials with almost no thought being generated by your mind. Not only do you not remember your problems anymore, but you become temporarily free of yourself – and what could be more relaxing than that? So does TV watching create inner space? Does it cause you to be present? Unfortunately, it does not. Although for long periods your mind may not be generating any thoughts, it has linked into the thought activity of the television show. It has linked up with the TV version of the collective mind, and is thinking its thoughts. Your mind is inactive only in the sense that it is not producing thoughts. It is, however, continuously absorbing thoughts and images that come through the TV screen. This induces a trancelike passive state of heightened susceptibility, not unlike hypnosis."

"I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television — of that I am quite sure."

"“You won’t get away with it. Heimdall has to have seen what you did, and what you have been doing. He knows you have been masquerading as me. He will expose you.” “Ha!” I stood and looked down upon him. “Heimdall spends every hour of every day watching the programming on over five hundred television stations. Even a god cannot escape transformation into a drooling idiot when subjected to that much television.”"

"People's imagination has been changed a lot by television."

"Niles Talbot: Fucking guys on TV, what do they know? Let me tell you something. If they put executions on TV it would be the fucking highest-rated show of all time. It'd be Neilsens through the roof. The other networks would start killing people just to compete. Pretty soon, Geraldo Rivera would be pulling that switch."

"On the Twilight Zone I knew I could get away with having Martians say things Republicans and Democrats couldn't."

"I think TV is sometimes more creatively satisfying because, you know, every week, like say on Samurai Jack, we were able to do something new and different. We really challenged ourselves. Oh, this week, we're going to fight zombies, and so, we'll do a real scary one. The next week, we're going to do a rave, and so we'll do it not as scary and just do more focusing on the dancing and the music. So, that was really fun creatively, but then the speed makes you suffer, because we have to go so fast. We have limited budgets, and so, we just go as fast as we can. Everything that we do is really our first instinct."

"And I'm not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests."

"What do you get from a glut of TV? A pain in the neck and an IQ of three Why don't you try simply reading a book? Or can you just not bear to look?"

"I may be vile and pernicious But you can't look away I make you think I'm delicious With the stuff that I say I'm the best you can get Have you guessed me yet? I'm the slime oozin' out From your TV set."

"Frequent and prolonged TV watching not only makes you unconscious, it also induces passivity and drains you of energy. Therefore, rather than watching at random, choose the programs you want to see. Whenever you remember to do so, feel the aliveness inside your body as you watch. Alternatively, be aware of your breathing from time to time. Look away from the screen at regular intervals so that it does not completely take possession of your visual sense. Don't turn up the volume any higher than necessary so that the TV doesn't overwhelm you on the auditory level. Use the mute button during commercials. Make sure you don't go to sleep immediately after switching off the set or, even worse, fall asleep with the set still on. p. 141"

"Dr. King ... felt it was important that children of all races see an African American female appearing on television as an equal."

"I haven't had a TV in 10 years, and I really don't miss it. 'Cause it's always so much more fun to be with people than it ever was to be with a television."

"Television has changed the American child from an irresistible force into an immovable object."

"Those who say they give the public what it wants begin by underestimating public taste, and end by debauching it."

"We’ve left the age of Difficult Men — to borrow the title of Brett Martin’s 2013 book about Sopranos–Mad Men–Breaking Bad–style drama — and entered an age of Difficult Shows. You're the Worst, Orange Is the New Black, Lady Dynamite, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Master of None, The Carmichael Show, Jane the Virgin, Crazy Ex Girlfriend, Baskets, Veep, Silicon Valley|, Archer, Catastrophe, Mom, Black-ish, Fresh Off the Boat — there’s infinitely more tonal and aesthetic variety in these mostly-funny-but-not-always comedies than in any comparable list of dramas you could put together."

"How can you put out a meaningful drama when every fifteen minutes proceedings are interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits with toilet paper?"

"My favourite show is The Sopranos. Movies would never have let [David Chase] do that ending. There would have been repercussions. They would have stopped promoting it a certain way and would have said ‘hmm, we tested it and it’s not doing so well, half the audience hates it’, that kind of stuff. But on TV everybody watched it. They might have hated it, but they all watched it and it was up to Chase to decide the ending. He had that freedom."

"There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: there is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to The Outer Limits."

"What television does is rent us friends and relatives who are quite satisfactory. The child watching TV loves these people, you know -- they're in color, and they're talking to the child. Why wouldn't a child relate to these people? And you know, if you can't sleep at 3 o'clock in the morning, you can turn on a switch, and there are your friends and relatives, and they obviously like you. And they're charming. Who wouldn't want Peter Jennings for a relative? This is quite something, to rent artificial friends and relatives right inside the house."

"Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative."

"I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts."

"TV is a drug, and we as a nation have become hooked."

"Television will enormously enlarge the eye's range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote."

"I kind of treat moviemaking and TV like the Army, and I kind of always have. Whoever is in charge, is in charge, and if they're going to march you up a hill and get you all killed, that's what you do. You march up that hill. You have to respect that, you have to respect that chain of command. I've done it under directors I believed in, I've done it under directors I didn't believe in. I've done it with executives and on projects."

"One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us."

"The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena — the videodrome. The television screen is the retina of the mind's eye. Therefore the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore television is reality, and reality is less than television."

"Hollywood, television and film is not my prime area of interest. Because I would never have any control, working in those areas. It’s nice to get the money from a Hollywood project, but whatever they do with it, it would be their piece of work, and not mine."

"Interviewer: Frank Hunt asks: What were the most important lessons you took away (as a writer and producer) from your time working on Star Trek?"

"Television may represent a threat to our culture analogous to the threat of atomic weapons to our civilization."

"My personal theory, which I’ve never bothered to research academically, is that television is what straightens out the narrative of Hollywood films for thirty-odd years, and it’s when VHS comes along that it starts to get freed up again. Because what happens in the television era is, TV is the big ancillary market, linear television becomes the way Hollywood films are paid for, and so they demand a narrative that you can follow even as the world’s distractions come upon you. So, the pizza deliveryman comes, you’re watching a film at home in 1975, you go and pay for the pizza, you sit back down. You don’t just pick up right where you left off, so you can’t have missed some fundamental thing, and the more linear the story, the better. Post-1982 or ’83-ish, you hit pause, you go pay for the pizza and you hit play again – you don’t miss anything. I think Disney were the first studio to realise that home video changed the nature of the films they were putting out. They weren’t doing it in a narrative sense, but they started layering the animation more and more, because they knew that kids would watch these films again and again. So, there’s also a visual density that comes in right about then – at the same time, Ridley Scott was making Blade Runner and stuffing the frame with all these different things; there’s too much to take in on one viewing."

"'s were one part sporting event, one part Roman spectacle, and, whatever else was true about him, his timing couldn't have been better, because the advent of television was suddenly changing the of American life."

"There were a grand total of fifty-five licensed television sets when Nehru died in 1964, about a hundred thousand when Indira Gandhi declared emergency in 1975, a little over two million when the Asian Games came to Delhi in 1982, thirty-four million families owned a TV set when Manmohan Singh opened up the economy in 1991 and when Narendra Modi was sworn in as Prime Minister in 2014, over 60 per cent of the 250 million homes in India had a television set."

"Unless and until there is unmistakable proof to the contrary, the presumption must be that television is and will be a main factor in influencing the values and moral standards of our society."

"Television does not, and cannot, merely reflect the moral standards of society. It must affect them, either by changing or by reinforcing them."

"Television. An advanced technical method of stopping people from making their own entertainment."

"The revolution will not be televised. The Revolution will be no rerun, brothers. The Revolution — will be live."

"Most dramas are plot-driven, stringing audiences from revelation to revelation, whereas comedies are character-driven. Game of Thrones, Empire, The Americans, Mr. Robot, Homeland, House of Cards, and the Shondaland shows (How to Get Away With Murder, Scandal, Grey’s [Anatomy]) are all about their twists, and they’re strategic about giving characters pretty basic motivations, such as a thirst for power, money, or validation. But comedies like Girls, Transparent, BoJack Horseman, and Catastrophe focus on unpacking their characters’ demented psychology, and they often detour into narrative cul-de-sacs..."

"Television’s greatest weakness is its reluctance to take positions. Historically, during times of greatest stress, during periods of greatest controversy, the mass media are the first to be attacked, the first to be muzzled, and also unhappily-historically and traditionally-the first to fold up their tent and look the other way."

"For the first time in television a writer will have the opportunity to let his imagination take him where ever he wants to. The sky is no longer the limit."

"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."

"It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome."

"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."

"Do you realize if it weren't for Edison we'd be watching TV by candlelight?"

"An EEG of a person watching TV shows that after about half an hour the brain decides that nothing is happening, and it goes into a hypnoidal twilight state, emitting alpha waves. This is because there is such little eye motion."

"IT ROTS THE SENSES IN THE HEAD! IT KILLS IMAGINATION DEAD! IT CLOGS AND CLUTTERS UP THE MIND! IT MAKES A CHILD SO DULL AND BLIND HE CAN NO LONGER UNDERSTAND A FANTASY, A FAIRYLAND! HIS BRAIN BECOMES AS SOFT AS CHEESE! HIS POWERS OF THINKING RUST AND FREEZE! HE CANNOT THINK–HE ONLY SEES!"

"It is not so much the low quality of the fare provided that is troubling. It is much more the difficulty of imagining any order of taste, any way of life with pleasures and learning that naturally fit the lives of the family’s members, keeping itself distinct from the popular culture and resisting the visions of what is admirable and interesting with which they are bombarded."