Television Producers

"But they weren't ready to see a black woman who happens to be a lesbian also making fun of the president."

"I feel like with as much blood of my ancestors that has been shed to build this country, this is my country. I feel like I have more of a right here than anyone else."

"I am so blessed to be a part of a generation like this because we are constantly raising the bar and pushing the boundaries of what we can do. Keep striving to do what you wanna do – it's your life."

"Especially being a young Black girl, we are often overlooked. We don't get the respect that we should get when it comes to our hard work and changing the narrative. At times you can feel it and you just have to remember what you bring to the table. At some point, you can't care what other people think. All we can do is live for ourselves because we are the only people that we know at the end of the day."

"A lot of people will say don't compare, but I have never met anybody that doesn't – it's just a normal human thing that we do."

"There is no limit to what you can reach and what you can strive for."

"Smallwood told CNN Fox has “so many skill sets that contribute to the success of any project.”"

"Her work ethic is incredible"

"Nobody can outwork her in the industry."

"To see how they make someone comfortable enough to confess with their body language, that was the one thing that was the most interesting to me, was how you can tell when the detective goes in for ‘the kill.’ When they (the detective) get comfortable with someone and make them feel like they’re a friend."

"There was a lot of different wonderful elements that we had to tackle and we did. I just thank my amazing cast for coming in and leaving their egos at the door and my crew for working so very hard."

"In Missing, we just kind of caught criminals. We would get them, arrest them, and turn them over. But hosting The Interrogation Room, going behind the scenes, showing how they build a case, how they get confessions, that was all totally new."

"We really had to make sure that we did that accurately because we didn’t want anyone walking away saying ‘Nah, that isn’t how it was. I don’t know if I, I don’t believe this"

"No shortcuts were taken here from the amount of showing the love story to then the redemption and showing the violence"

"I loved watching some 48 Hours, some Dateline, I love a good whodunit just like everybody else does! Just trying to figure out how that simple piece of hair, or blood drop, or footprint can help solve a crime."

"When I found out how inaccurately she was portrayed on [other] series, that was a driving force."

"I think that by her being a woman director, it just brought so much,"

"I mean, she understood the story. quated by (Tonesa Welch)"

"I wouldn't want to do a show that looked and smelled just like another show. So you really have to force yourself to think hard about what's like what hasn't been seen, what hasn't been done. Particularly for network, because on cable there's a little, and I haven't really done much cable at all, only two or three series, but there's a luxury there where if your show fails, nobody really notices."

"Certainly in the early days when I was doing a lot of shows for Fox and I was working with my friend Mike Darnell, we would sit there and try to think of crazy ideas and we would try to warm up each other. And then whenever we thought we'd have something that could be produced into a television show, we'd always say, well, can we really put that on television? And then when we would say that, we said, now we have to put it on television. Because if it was questionable about whether or not it was appropriate for viewers, then we knew we had a chance to be a success."

"“We did a whole send-out when she died, we did a tribute to Magic at the end of one of the episodes and stuff,” Fleiss recalls. “So I’ve always had Rottweilers with me on the sets. I have one now. They’re great dogs.”"

"“[Berkeley, Professor Hubert Dreyfus] always contended … for very philosophical and biological reasons … [AI was] never going to be able to do what a human being could do, but they could achieve mediocrity as a simulation.”"

"If I have any skill at all, it's the ability to come up with ideas that get people talking. With so many choices out there for viewers, you've got to get people talking about your show or you have no chance at all."

"I simply regard romantic comedies as a subgenre of sci-fi, in which the world created therein has different rules than my regular human world. …. There is no difference between Ripley from Alien and any Katherine Heigl character."

"I could really relate to [Never Have I Ever], more than anything else that I’ve ever written. I was personally proud of it, but didn’t know how it would be received. And to this day, I think it’s my biggest success in terms of how many people it reached and how popular it was on Netflix. I learned a lesson from it, which is not to be cynical about the public."

"I'm going to gently assume that if you're reading this book, you are a little bit of a nerd, or perhaps you're a man whose nerd girlfriend is taking a long time in the bathroom and you can't figure out how to turn on her television."

"When you’re starting out [as a television writer], mostly it’s terrifying because you think you could get fired and then never get hired again. If you see some of the statistics for women of color on writing staffs, you’ll see that even if there’s parity, it’s so hard to get promoted and stay on a show. A whopping majority of upper-level writers are still white men. You see a lot of people of color in the younger ranks, but it’s hard to move up."

"I think there’s been a tendency for people to conflate my characters with my personality. … I wrote 24 episodes of The Office. That’s more than any other person on The Office, but no one can really picture me sitting and doing the hard work of writing the episodes."

"I’m surprised when I remember that, physically, I resemble most women in this country. In the United States, a woman who is 5 feet 4 inches and a size 10 is probably more common than virtually any other body type. But somehow when she is on-screen it’s shocking to people, almost as shocking as seeing a married couple on TV where the man and woman are roughly the same age."

"I was at the movies yesterday, and before the movie started they had this long ad where they were trying to say … "Don't download things illegally" et cetera. And … they were like, "You wouldn't steal a purse, would you? You wouldn't think of stealing a car." And I was thinking about it … and I was like, "You know what? I would steal a car if it was as easy as, like, touching the car, and then 30 seconds later I own the car." And, like, I would steal a car if … [even though I stole] the car, the person who owned the car got to keep the car. And I would also steal a car if no one I had ever met had ever bought a car before in their whole lives."

"All shows have a lifespan. You start to run out of stories. You start to run out of a new vision. It is very hard to sustain something too long and it'll become detrimental when you do. These have lifespans, I believe."

"I fought hard for her to get that job. I wanted her to get that job. And she was paid her money. She was paid the money for the budget that we had."

"Oftentimes, we get scared because we’re too afraid to lose something, We’re too afraid to lose the mortgage payment...too afraid to lose our stuff, so we’ll just go along to get along. Be unafraid, even if [you have to] stand alone. That’s what has to happen. Because when you look in the mirror, you’ve got to be OK with the one looking back at you."

"I abused and betrayed the trust of another sibling, my sister, my blood. I’m sorry, Mo’Nique. I’m sorry."

"What you’re saying to the community is, as Black women, you’re devalued. And if you stand up and you make a stand and you say We need equality and we have to say what’s right and what’s fair."

"Inequality is devastating and it's extreme."

"And stop hiding behind what you call is negative comments…what people are beginning to do is see you for who you are."

"There was an energy in that building — of honesty, of truth-telling, of freedom, and that was what that show was, Because it is my journey and my story, where I pick and choose to tell it is totally up to me."

"So often times, we do it to ourselves. But, I just can’t. Understand, I love my sister. However, when you know you’re being fed the wrong food, you must say, ‘I can’t chew this, y’all."

"You want to be honest with a character and play it truthfully, and you want to be genuine with your character."

"Sadly, in any industry and in any work-related environment, females always strive to achieve a certain amount of perfection, whether that be skinny or pretty. It's a constant, in our society."

"That is the biggest form of bullying ever, the paparazzi. Printing lies, making accusations, it's just bullying."

"I feel like every role you take, there's a part of you that obviously feels like you can do it. I don't know if perfect is the right word because I don't believe in perfection. I don't think it exists."

"I don’t wear makeup. I don’t wash my hair every day. It’s not something that I associate with myself. I commend women who wake up 30, 40 minutes early to put on eyeliner. I think it’s ­beautiful. I’m just not that person. So to go to a shoot and have my makeup artist put on face cream and send me off to do a photo, I was like, “Well, this makes life easy.”"

"I would say that by third grade I spoke pretty fluent English. I don't remember much of second grade. I've said this before. I was not a traumatized kid, by any means with the way that this might come out, but I pretty much blocked out all of second grade in the states. I'm guessing it was because it was hard and my parents said that I came home crying every night but I don't remember it. I think it was rough because I just didn't know where I was and I didn't get the culture. I didn't get the people. I'll be honest, I never...I met an African American person for the first time in my life when I was seven. I didn't know they existed. I didn't know there were people of a different color. I didn't know people with red hair existed. It wasn't even...it wasn't because I wasn't taught that in school but I think it just wasn't where I grew up. So much of it was, forget the language barrier, just a culture shock. I think adapting to the culture was much harder than actually learning English."

"I didn't fail out. I dropped out. I did not fail. I was actually a pretty good student. My problem was that I didn't know what I wanted to study. What was I going to go in? Undecided? I took a class on Zionist theory. I took classes that interested me, that weren't necessarily for a specific degree. Then I realized and spoke to my parents and I said, 'I do love what I do and I want to pursue it.' They were like, 'Oh, why don't you just drop out.'"

"Comedy is very hard and I don't know if it's where my heart necessarily is but doing comedy is one of those things where if something is funny right now does not necessarily mean it's going to sustain itself for a year in production and be funny when the movie comes out and that to me is the hardest thing. I love playing different characters and I love doing fun things and I love to entertain people, whether that be in a comedy or a drama. If I get you to laugh or I get you to cry I'm super stoked, as morbid as that might sound."

"The desire to be perfect. Women innately have this weird thing where they try to have a perfect persona—to look perfect, be perfect, act perfect, have their kids look a certain way. Women put so much pressure on themselves."

"I wanted to quit the industry when I was eighteen and finish '70's', finish my contract on the show and go to college because I was pretty convinced that after '70's and after being on a show for eight years that I would be very much pigeonholed for something specific that I didn't want to be a part of anymore. So my attempt at college failed miserably and I dropped out and decided that this is what I wanted to do for a living. When I made that decision I had to convince myself to disassociate myself from the industry, if that makes any sense, to be who I am and to have this just be what I do and that the paths could never cross. If they did then I think that given after '70's it was like a good year of just pure rejection. So if I didn't disassociate myself from what I did I would probably go through depression, I would assume, or go through some hard times. But I didn't and I always had some other things that were more important to me. I had family that was more important. I had my life that was more important. I had hobbies that were more important and this was just my job."

"People have interpretations of what you're supposed to be like. If you're unattractive and overweight, you must have a great personality. If you're attractive, then you must not be the nicest person. People are always taken aback that I'm easygoing but not necessarily stupid."