I found out a long time ago that if I indulged by stuffing my face with great food, lying about reading books and watching TV or talking on the phone, I was not a happy camper.
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 TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing.
The two major things that changed the makeup of all professional sports are money generated by television and courts that players went to in order to win their freedom as free agents.
They both go together; you can't be in front of the camera hosting a fitness television show in front of 75 million households and not have trained 6 days per week year round - in a bikini no less.
I watch so much TV, it's sad. I watch 'Happy Endings', '30 Rock', 'Parks and Rec', 'The Office', 'Eagleheart', 'Children's Hospital'. 'Modern Family' I guess I'm still kinda watching.
I would argue that television and particularly the BBC were instrumental in puffing up the Royal Family to a level where they were inflated out of all, all proportion to their relevance on the national scene.
On radio and television, magazines and the movies, you can't tell what you're going to get. When you look at the comic page, you can usually depend on something acceptable by the entire family.
When I began to think about the head of the family, the storyteller, the rise of television which became the new storyteller, the break-up of the American family as an idea and then Avalon came.
Conservatives are routinely pilloried on television. A&E likely greenlit 'Duck Dynasty' in the first place because executives believed Americans would laugh at the redneck antics of the self-described 'white trash' family.
The TV is often on in our house, but I really only keep up with three shows: 'American Idol,' 'Modern Family' and 'The Walking Dead.' Sometimes I'll sip red wine - it's a nice way to slow down and relax.
I've had a passion for horses since I was very young - I used to sit on the floor in front of the races on television and pretend to be a jockey - and I first began reading the racing form on the set of 'The Partridge Family.'
My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa and its Africans as extensions of the stereotyped characters that we saw in movies and on television in films such as 'Tarzan' and in programs such as 'Ramar of the Jungle' and 'Sheena, Queen ...
Sometimes in TV, it can get really stale, especially if you're doing these 23-episode years. It's a lot of work, and to put your family through that, on a location, is not always the greatest thing in the world.
When you've grown sick of reading and bug-eyed from watching TV, when your friends are all visited out, no words can adequately praise the link to the outside world provided by your parents and family.
I was the youngest in my family. When the other kids went to school, my mother would make them breakfast and then she would go back to bed for an hour, so I was sort of babysat by television.
If you're doing television, you get to be a character for a long time, and the cast around you becomes like family. You get attached to playing that one character, and it's hard leaving them behind.
The beauty of where I'm from - this small little town called Wallburg, North Carolina - I didn't have a TV; I was out playing ball with my dad, shooting clay pigeons.
The beauty of 'The Walking Dead' and the beauty of being on a television show for a while, is that, it's your backstory, it's part of what you are, it's what you carry with you every day.
Anybody who really knows about the TV business knows that it would be impossible to just march in one day and say to your colleagues and bosses, 'Oh yes, I'm hosting my own show.'
Governments, whether right or left, have become commissioners-in-chief, nudging and cajoling networks into preferred business models without the slightest sensitivity or awareness of what the public wants or the TV industry is capable of.
