A Quote by Alia Shawkat

American shows can go on for 20 years. I respond more to the British format. Three seasons is a long run for them to tell a story. — © Alia Shawkat
American shows can go on for 20 years. I respond more to the British format. Three seasons is a long run for them to tell a story.
I have no idea what a British sensibility or a British sense of humor is. I have no concept of what that is. I have no concept of what American sensibility is. I was born in Great Britain, but I was only there for six months, and we moved to Belgium, where I grew up. I love Britain, I lived there for nine years doing shows and things, but I don't know what a British sensibility is. I'd like to have someone tell me what an American sensibility is.
I live in L.A. so I worry my kids aren't that connected to Britain, I suppose I don't want them to become American kids. We try to get back three or four times a year. When they go to school they speak with a British-American accent but when they come home to us they go back to their British accent.
As a format, I have watched shows from the West. I have tried to understand what it is and how this format is treated by writers, directors, and actors. I have been studying this format for four to five years.
I live in LA so I worry my kids aren't that connected to Britain, I suppose I don't want them to become American kids. We try to get back three or four times a year. When they go to school they speak with a British-American accent but when they come home to us they go back to their British accent, so I can deal with that.
There's something about TV shows and the format that becomes a bit more personal. People watch two, three in a row before they get out of bed on their laptop or when they get home from going out and before they go to sleep. People make shows part of their daily routine, and that makes them take ownership of it. If you're so arrogant as to call yourself an artist, you can't ask for anything more than that.
This long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.
I love Britain, I lived there for nine years doing shows and things, but I don't know what a British sensibility is. I'd like to have someone tell me what an American sensibility is.
Long-format television is a better way to tell a female story.
When writing I just go with the song. I go with the song and try to tell the story. So the story may be "Wonderful Baby", which is a little song. Or it might be a gentle song, "Empty Chairs". Or it might be a rock and roll song like "Prime Time" or "Run, Diana, Run", or "American Pie". I don't know where it's gonna go. I don't have any idea what I'm doing. I just do it. I just keep doing it. I keep taking adva
I want each season to feel new and special. I don't want it to feel, "Oh, more of this." That's something that's easy to do in the first three seasons, and harder to do as you go. I'd rather err on the side of blowing up everything and being like, "Why did you do that? There was more story to tell there," and moving the family to Mexico like on Weeds, instead of people going, "Oh, we've seen this already. We're tired of this."
I watch mediocre shows that have been on for three or four seasons, and feel angry at them.
Sometimes you try a song and people don't respond, or you tell a story and you just hear crickets. But when you play thousands of shows, you start to refine stuff.
After three years in L.A., I began to dream of my glory days on the boards. But it's very difficult to make a living as a theater actor in New York, which is why I moved out here, and I always had an ambition to work in television. I am a great admirer of the format, and I think it's how we tell long stories.
I do watch 'Revenge,' 'American Horror Story' and 'Game of Thrones.' I am behind on all of them. But I do watch them. Those are my go-to shows.
When I was a kid growing up, there might be 10 shows on the air that had been on for ten seasons or eleven seasons. 'Gunsmoke' ran for over twenty years.
A 90-minute time frame is not long enough to tell a good female story, and that's why long-format television has become so great for female storytelling and for female performers and directors and writers.
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