John Landgraf Quotes

Two things happen when you’re fearful. First, you make seemingly rational decisions that are actually hedges. Or second, you fail to do something because you worry about the consequences.

I think the possibility of continuing on a comedy is greater than a drama.

Silicon Valley has infinite access to capital and can lose money indefinitely.

As much as I very much want audiences to watch FX’s carefully curated and highly contextualized television shows, I’m now glad when anyone takes the time to watch even our competition’s television series, as long as it demands their sustained attention and challenges their knee-jerk perceptions.

I believe really deeply in the pilot process because you learn things about tone and casting.

You look at who’s actually created shows for FX that have succeeded, and there are a lot of first-time showrunners – Ryan Murphy, Denis Leary, Louis C.K., the ‘It’s Always Sunny’ creators, Kurt Sutter, Joe Weisberg, Pamela Adlon, Donald Glover.

I think maybe the most important thing that I or anybody at my company and any of my colleagues can do is establish a trusting, productive, collaborative relationship with creative people.

We want to make the best television possible. We should be drawing on the entire available pool of storytellers and directors, and we should be expanding that pool and trying to hire the very, very, very best people. That’s our job.

That’s the definition of a mini-series. A mini-series is a show that has no continuing story or narrative elements between one group of episodes and another, so no, I wasn’t surprised.

All the world’s combined knowledge is at our fingertips. But the same technology that makes this possible is robbing us of deeper insight.

It’s easier to solve the problem more quickly with directors than with writers.

Perhaps storytellers don’t need to care as much about the future as executives and investors do. After all, isn’t it possible that technology will enable storytellers to connect directly to their audience without the need for anyone to share the programming decisions or the profit in between? Don’t bet on it.

I believe really deeply in the pilot process because you learn things about tone and casting. Even some of our best shows have had substantial re-shoots and reworking before they’ve gone on the air.

It’s not that writing staffs don’t change at all, but they don’t change very much. Directors are freelancers. There are directors who do five or 10 episodes of a show every year for years, but most directors are freelance, they come and go.

Information technology and the Internet are rapidly transforming almost every aspect of our lives – some for better, some for worse.

I think it would be bad for storytellers in general if one company was able to seize a 40-50-60% share in storytelling. I don’t think monopoly market shares are good for society, and I think they’d be particularly bad for society and storytellers if they were achieved in the storytelling genre.

I think a shotgun or a handgun that has a six-round clip is a very good, perfectly adequate weapon for self-defense, in the home. You simply can’t create that kind of mayhem, if you have to reload.

Television shows are not like cars or operating systems, and they are not best made by engineers or coders in the same assembly line manner as consumer products which need to be of uniform size, shape, and quality.

I’m not interested in world domination. I’m interested in running a nice little brand that takes care of its own and does really good work.

Was there ever anyone more ill-suited for being the showman of the year than me?

I don’t think I ever had any relationship with any showrunner, over time, with whom I didn’t have conflict.

I have a lot of faith in our showrunners.

I have respect for anyone who helps a creator put a great television show on the air.

As incredible as television has become, it often feels like a sideshow in what has become a daily three-ring media circus.

I hope that most of us believe that we actually would all benefit from living in a more equitable society. If that’s not happening, we’re squandering human potential.