Television Drama Quotes

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.

What directors of television drama constantly tell you is 'Don't act it.

Don't try. Don't emphasise that word'. Whereas with someone like Blackadder, even though he's a relatively low key character in a way, he did relish the lines that he had and the words that he was given, with a lot of inflection.

It's the demand in many ways of modern television drama - it's very low key and naturalistic, and, generally speaking, the characters that I've played have not been low key and naturalistic.

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

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.

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

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.

Drama's not safe and it's not pretty and it's not kind.

People expect the basic template of television drama where there might be naughty villains, but everyone ends up having a nice cup of tea. You've got to do big moral choices and show the terrible things people do in terrible situations. Drama is failing if it doesn't do that.

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.

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.

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

Crime dramas will never go away as long as people turn to television for, among other things, reassurance and comfort.

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.

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.

There's even more blending of genres happening.

They blend sci-fi with action, or family drama with a mystery show. People don't want to just do the same thing that everybody's done a thousand times before, and that's probably a big part of it. I think you're also seeing television and features speak to each other. You see it happen in movies, and it starts to get reflected on the small screen.

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.

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.

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.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter. With the laugh comes the tears and in developing motion pictures or television shows, you must combine all the facts of life - drama, pathos and humor.

Some of the most interesting questions needing to be asked today can best be asked on television, or on stage, and they can be wonderful, great dramas, but they won't necessarily be blockbusters.

You know what I want? The answer is, I truly don't know what I want.

I don't want to do a television series. I want to do dramas as well as comedies, but I have no idea what kind or in what order. Just give me the chance at them.

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.

I grew up doing plays - I went to a stage school after school - and it's always something that I've wanted to do, but, in a weird way, if you do television and film and you didn't go to drama school and don't have a theatrical background, it's hard to get your foot in the door. In the same way that it is for theater actors to get into television and film. There's a weird prejudice that goes both ways.

What I've observed is that television in the last decade has increased to something that's almost unrecognizable. They are feature films. That's a huge shift, and it's something the audience expects. They still may want to watch their half-hour sitcom, but when they watch scripted drama, they expect the standard.

Film and television as a medium has only very recently begun to be taught at the great drama schools in the UK. When I was at drama school in the UK, 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 Anton Chekhov and William Shakespeare, you are likely to be in a washing-up soap-liquid commercial."

I worked mostly in television drama for my first few years.

I just kept guesting on NYPD Blues and CSI-like stuff, so when I started getting work in comedy, a lot of people in the business would say, 'Oh - I didn't know you did comedy.'

[I remember going] to a hotel gym at six o'clock in the morning, and the television was on, and it's some drama in which two men have clearly kidnapped a woman. They're interrogating her, and they put a plastic bag over her head. They're suffocating her, and I'm thinking, It's six o'clock in the morning! Why does anybody need to see this? How can I find the off switch?

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.

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

One of the more problematic aspects of the current state of cinema in Japan is that the movies playing in the theaters are by and large made not by film studios but by broadcasting companies. They're either extensions of popular television dramas or adaptations of manga or anime. Younger Japanese are simply not being exposed to good films. That situation needs to change.

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.

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

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.

I grew up in repertory theaters, so it was comedy one night, drama the next.

I'm used to going from one to the other. And I worked for years in television as well. So, I like the interrelationship of it and having a good relationship with a group of artists creating something really where the sum is greater than all of our individual contributions, our parts.