Outside of the mindless sitcoms that the networks thrive on, people able to think generally consider most entertainment is escape in one form or another.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I think people watch TV to escape from life.
I think television keeps on being a place where writers can go, and if they're successful, they can have their way, and they can have creative freedom.
In television, there's this weird sense of isolation from your audience; you kind of get this feeling that you write the show for you and your wife and your friends and the other people who work on the show. It's our little show, and then it goes out into the world, and somebody watches it.
Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.
There's people who watch shows while they're preparing their dinners, and they don't want to focus, and they don't want to be challenged, and whatever. And then there's people who want to really sit down and get into a character in a world, and feel like they're expanding, or they have complex relationships, or whatever.
There are shows that are monolithic successes on TV that nobody in the business ever watches one episode of.
The only thing I miss from the sitcom format is that immediate gratification of when you're, if we're talking about comedy, of the live audience.
Television is a powerful medium that has to be used for something better than sitcoms and police shows. On the other hand, if you don't recognize the forces that play on what people watch and what they don't then you're a fool and you should be in a different business.
One thing I won't do in television is a sitcom. I find that world to be so neurotic and bizarre.
Entertainment shows make a living on behind-the-scenes stuff that can now be doled out socially. When we see it, we're like, 'Uh oh.'