Quotes About Television Drama

#1. With a play, you do it and it's gone. Films always date. Television drama always dates. Television comedy, for some reason, seems to go on.

Penelope Keith

#2. I'm a right pain in the hole for my agent. I won't take certain parts if I think they're offensive or banal. For instance, I won't do a film if I think it's full of violence for violence's sake, or a television drama if I don't think it's intelligent writing.

Anne-Marie Duff

#3. Her life was no more than a ghostly pageant of exhausted endurance, no more real than a television drama. Death, who now stood by her side, was as familiar to her as a family member, missing for a long time but now returned.

Han Kang

#4. If we really exist merely to fulfill God's plan: then life is a television drama; with God being the scriptwriter, the director, and, the audience.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

#5. I was my class playwright and I wrote plays set in villages with kings and chiefs.My plays were about treason and betrayals. If they were influenced by Macbeth, they were also influenced by Nigerian plays I had seen and Village Headmaster, a television drama series I had watched as a child.

Sefi Atta

#6. I grew up in the theatre. It's where I got my start. Writing a television drama with theatrical dialogue about the theatre is beyond perfection.

Aaron Sorkin

#7. I bored myself to tears with the daytime television drama of confrontation (I've been wronged!). I winced at sluggish morning half-memories of wearing wrongness like a lampshade on my head (I'm mentally ill!).

Merri Lisa Johnson

#8. Why be so bloody miserable when you can pick up a good book or watch a great television drama?

Michael Dobbs

#9. Whatever you do, whether you're doing a television drama or a romantic comedy, you want to be relevant, to some degree.

John Ridley

#10. I was in television drama, which is a first cousin to the movies, and I trust myself to make the right decisions.

Lee Child

#11. Live television drama was like live theater, because you moved without thinking about the camera. It followed you around. In film you have to be more aware of what the camera is doing.

Louise Fletcher

#12. It is probable that television drama of high caliber and produced by first-rate artists will materially raise the level of dramatic taste of the nation.

David Sarnoff

#13. One of the things I've been most excited by is U.S. television drama. For my money, it's some of the greatest narrative art of our time. Each series is like a 19th-century Russian novel: you need to do a lot of work in the first few episodes, just as you do in the first 50-60 pages of those books.

Kevin Barry

#14. I love a bit of political drama; 'The West Wing' is probably my favourite television series of all time.

David Tennant

#15. Police thrillers are so widely read and police dramas so commonplace on television that many people think they have a good understanding of what a cop's world is like. But in truth that world is seldom revealed with anything approaching verisimilitude. We get it with The Wagon.

Daniel Horan

#16. I came into reality television with MTV's show 'The Real World,' specifically the 1994 season set in San Francisco. I was glued to the Puck and Pedro drama.

Molly O'Keefe

#17. Downton Abbey is the most popular drama in the history of public television. When the whole of the TV universe is fragmenting, that isn't just impressive. It's almost impossible. But here we are.

David Bianculli

#18. A lot of people are doing television now. Great, legendary actors are doing movies on cable and stuff now, and you can't blame them, because they're still doing adult dramas and adult comedies on those stations.

Billy Bob Thornton

#19. 'Shameless' is going to shake up television. Any drama is good drama. Bring it.

Justin Chatwin

#20. In prose fiction the freedom to work honestly exists, although you may have to fight for it. In those other areas of literature, I mean drama, there is only silence. That sort of aesthetic integrity does not exist in radio and television, and seldom on film.

James Kelman

#21. I don't think anything connects with an audience as deeply as a long-form serialized drama, and much as I love television, I've always found a good ongoing comics series to be much more immersive.

Brian K. Vaughan

#22. If all the shows on television were about happy, functional relationships, first of all I don't know how many role models there are out there, sadly. And secondly, who would watch? Drama is conflict.

Andrea Roth

#23. Even in a hostile press conference with hostile questions there was drama, and he could benefit from the drama and the hostility. He mastered the greatest art of television, appearing to be spontaneous without in fact being spontaneous.

David Halberstam

#24. I think television is a unique form, in terms of storytelling. Having source material for these really dense, complicated, serialized dramas is a great way of world-building.

Chris Albrecht

#25. I'd love to be in a feature film, and I don't just mean in a starring role - it could be a small part. And I would like to act in television, to do comedy and drama.

Barbara Mandrell

#26. I started on television, and on sitcoms, and loved them, but then they sort of seemed to be going through sort of an ice age, and they started dying off one by one, and I recognized that, and my representatives recognized that, and we said 'Well, let's look at dramas and other things like that.'

David Alan Basche

#27. I'm a great admirer, fan and consumer of television. I love serial drama. I have been a major fan of HBO's series for many years.

Todd Haynes

#28. When I was at drama school in the U.K., I was there for two and a half years, and we did one week of television and film. It's right before you leave. It's like, 'We've taught you Chekhov and Shakespeare; you are likely to be in a washing-up soap-liquid commercial.'

James Callis

#29. I come out of TV. I come out of live television, BBC drama: that's where I started first as a designer, then a director. Then I went independent TV, then television advertising.

Ridley Scott

#30. TV is a pornographic cacophony of violence, death obsession, screams, gunfire and drama. You think it's fine because you are damaged.

Bryant McGill

#31. The experience of reading a novel and watching a television show are quite different. You can't let your audience get ahead of you, and you have to keep the energy and the pace and the drama up. They're very different things.

Michelle Fairley

#32. When I was trying to find work after drama school in London, it felt like the same actors always got the plum roles, especially in television. We have a smaller market place, vastly fewer drama-producing networks, and they seem to compete for the same established names for those projects.

Jamie Bamber

#33. News is the best drama on television because it's real.

Deborah Turness

#34. The quality of TV drama nowadays is getting better and better. They've had to invent a new term for it: 'high-end television.'

Robert Carlyle

#35. We need to look to our laurels a bit with television in this country. I don't think enough risks are being taken in drama television in the U.K., and I think a lot of programme makers are underestimating the intelligence of the viewing public, basing it all on ratings.

Charles Dance

#36. I certainly do all sorts of work. I'm very, very blessed to do drama and other types of television, and things like that, but I always go back to sci-fi, whenever possible, because that's really exciting for me.

Gina Holden

#37. I danced from the age of three, so I was always going to do something performance-related. I got into the Television Workshop drama group in Nottingham when I was 11 and went there for ten years.

Vicky McClure

#38. To try something longer, I entered a half-hour radio drama contest with the national public broadcaster, CBC. To my surprise, I won. And that opened doors in film and television, because that broadcaster was looking to cultivate new Canadian talent, especially women who could write.

Karen Walton

#39. One of the things that makes any good entertainment, whether it's a play, drama, comedy, television, film, whatever, is that you feel a certain amount of spontaneity.

Glenn Howerton

#40. Comedy does offer an avenue to television and film careers for untelegenic people that great drama does not.

John Hodgman

#41. 'Survivor' was, to me, an absolute reaction that the audience was having to the sort of staid nature of narrative drama on television.

Thomas Schlamme

#42. The problem is these days people don't watch television together. The husband is downstairs watching The Game and the wife is upstairs watching The Good Wife. They don't need a show they can watch together. What family dramas are on now that are working?

Warren Leight

#43. I was doing an hour drama on television and a Jackie Chan movie in Toronto, so I was on a plane every three days.

Debi Mazar

#44. I suppose drama can either take the place of a novel or can be very closely allied with it. It's quite customary to turn a successful novel into a film or a television series because you can dramatize and pictorialize a novel.

William Golding

#45. I love action shows. I love drama. There's no one type of thing. Television has gotten so good, and there's so much to do.

Bridget Regan

#46. From a dramatic viewpoint, there are few professions that grant their members entry into other lives, high among them cops, doctors, clergymen, journalists and prostitutes. Perhaps that explains why they figure in so much television and cinema. Their lives are lived in the midst of human drama.

Roger Ebert

#47. I just like the continue doing what I've been doing. A melange of funny, straight drama, television, movies, a little theater here and there wouldn't hurt. So if I can keep doing that, I'll be a very happy person.

Mary Tyler Moore

#48. One thing about television in Britain is that they're so scared about complaints. It curbs a lot of drama.

Alice Lowe

#49. I like the fact that a modern television and modern drama on cable has characters that are really intricate and deep and have multiple layers.

Matthew Lillard

#50. Penalties are not football. They are not even as television people keep telling us, great drama. They are cheap melodrama.

Simon Barnes

#51. If you spend any time on the shooting of a drama, for television or movies, it's very slow and there's a lot of standing around.

Rebecca Eaton

#52. One feels relieved these days when a play is not like television.

Valerie Martin

#53. Of the people who cook on television, I have admired people like Jacques Pepin, Julia Child, Mario Batali, Jamie Oliver and a few others because they are free of drama, display good taste and masterful technique, and use clear exposition to bring you up to speed.

Steve Albini

#54. I think it's very rare that you see girl friendships on television. It's always cattiness and all that drama.

Lyndsy Fonseca

#55. I came out of drama school thinking I'd do some theatre, maybe some television, and maybe, someday, a film.

Orlando Bloom

#56. It's funny: All my friends back home are always wondering why every television show I'm on is a drama, but all the comedy pilots I did died a slow and painful death.

Eric Ladin

#57. In television, women can really run anything. It can be a comedy, it can be a drama, it can be genre, it can be anything. But in films, women are still getting to the top.

Sarah Michelle Gellar

#58. I was dreading all of the ghost stories of working on American television, not in the least, the length. In Britain, a series is six episodes of an hour drama, maybe sometimes eight, but never twenty-two, so I was petrified of that.

Lennie James

#59. We didn't have television until I was about eight years old, so it was either the movies or radio. A lot of radio drama. That was our television, you know. We had to use our imagination. So it was really those two things, and the comics, that I immersed myself in as a child.

Jessica Hagedorn