take something that s familiar, and give it some chili pepper. advertising is based on one thing, happiness. is there any taboo that you wouldn t break? not if there was a funny idea. what is wrong with you? there s so much different storytelling, and so many different stories being told about so many different people. i don t think dramatic series television has ever been stronger. there s no longer this theory of what popular entertainment must be. incoming! who are the heroes? the people who watch this show. this is the week when the major broadcast networks unveil their full lineup of shows. and every executive in hollywood knows how well the sopranos is doing on cable, which is a network problem. i think hbo altered everything for this reason alone, is there were no commercials. we are dependent on sponsors. right. there is so much we can do in terms of language, in terms of violence, and in terms of sex. to a large degree, a lot of exec
and i thought, you know, watching it, i said, this is gonna be a funny show. can i say something very quickly here? why do we have to fight? the two of you? can t we just say something nice about john kerry right now. i like john, i care about john kerry. and something about president bush. he ll be unemployed soon. i think anyone who enjoyed paying attention to the news and watch the daily show will forever remember jon stewart going on crossfire and reading those guys the riot act. you re doing theater when you should be doing debate, which would be great. it s not honest. what you do is not honest. what you do is partisan hackery. and i ll tell you why i know it. you have john kerry on your show and you sniff his throne and accusing us of partisan hackery? absolutely. you ve got to be kidding me. you re on cnn. the show that leads into me is puppets making prank phone calls. what is wrong with you? comedians and satire, when done right, will take on hypocrisy
lose viewership over time. like stones. because if the audience misses an episode, then they would be inclined to stop watching it because they would feel, like i missed one and now i don t know what s happening. there had been amazing shows that had been serialized. they never had syndication value, because you couldn t revisit them. but there s almost no better hook. it s like a book you can t turn down. like, okay, i m just going to watch a little bit more. 24 was set to debut in november of 2001. the pilot climaxes with an assassin blowing up a passenger jet in midair. fox orders this, fox schedules it. 9/11 happens. suddenly, this show which seemed like this goofy thing about kiefer sutherland chasing after middle eastern extremist terrorists becomes the most timely show on television, because that is all that anyone
battlestar galactica was a show made in the late 1970s. not a very good show, but a show with a really good idea, which is civilization has been destroyed, humanity s on the run. what happens next? years later, syfy channel looked at it and said, well what if we take it seriously? madam president, we have to eliminate the olympic carrier immediately. there are 1,300 people on that shp. star wars feels like fantasy and fable in the best possible sense. this felt like war. do it. the photography was shot very much like world war ii combat cameraman work. okay, fire on my mark. no frack and way leave. come on. it was as if someone was floating in space with an old world war ii film on, and oh, here comes a cylon. i want to get this shot.
when we were making the decision to do breaking bad, we absolutely were looking for an antihero show, and we wanted a guy that was going against the grain. dad, come check this out. yeah, i see it. come on, take it. they always tell you, you need to have a good one-sentence pitch. and i came up with, we re gonna take mr. chips, and we re gonna turn them into scarface. what we were really going for was change. walter white says it in the first hour of the show. electrons. they change their energy levels. molecules. molecules change their bonds. breaking bad was a study in change. the change that happens to one character as he devolves from good to bad. you know the business, and i know the chemistry.