An overnight success is ten years in the making.

He devoured morning shows, daytime shows, late-night talk shows, soaps, situation comedies, Lifetime Movies, hospital dramas, police series, vampire and zombie serials, the dramas of housewives from Atlanta, New Jersey, Beverly Hills and New York, the romances and quarrels of hotel-fortune princesses and self-styled shahs, the cavortings of individuals made famous by happy nudities, the fifteen minutes of fame accorded to young persons with large social media followings on account of their plastic-surgery acquisition of a third breast or their post-rib-removal figures that mimicked the impossible shape of the Mattel company’s Barbie doll, or even, more simply, their ability to catch giant carp in picturesque settings while wearing only the tiniest of string bikinis; as well as singing competitions, cooking competitions, competitions for business propositions, competitions for business apprenticeships, competitions between remote-controlled monster vehicles, fashion competitions, competitions for the affections of both bachelors and bachelorettes, baseball games, basketball games, football games, wrestling bouts, kickboxing bouts, extreme sports programming and, of course, beauty contests.

What we witnessed with the death of Kennedy was the triumph of television; what we saw with his assassination, and with his funeral, was the beginning of television's dominance of our culture — for television is at its most solemnly self-serving and at its mesmerizing best when it is depicting the untimely deaths of the chosen and the golden. It is as witness to the butchery of heroes in their prime — and of all holy-seeming innocents — that televisions achieves its deplorable greatness.

"What TV is extremely good at — and realize that this is "all it does" — is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it."

...teaching is, after all, a form of show business.

Television is chewing gum for the eyes.

Success? It has the shortest half-life of any known substance.

Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television.

A clumsy, awkward success is still a success.

Batman knew what it was like to trip balls without seriously losing his shit, and that savoir faire added another layer to his outlaw sexiness and alluring aura of decadence and wealth.

Relatable is the secret of success.

It was about as easy getting the Statue of Liberty to spread cunny, which did take some dynamite persuasion.

Broadcast television succeeded by providing the same thing to all its viewers — a model driven by the technological innovation of broadcasting content via wireless signals and later coaxial cable. Netflix succeeds by providing a carefully personalized experience to each of its many viewers, giving it a huge advantage over its traditional television competitors. Moreover, Netflix produces exactly what it knows its customers want based on their past viewing habits, eliminating the waste of all those pilots, and only loses customers when they make a proactive decision to cancel their subscription

After a time, she believed in the reality of this comedy