A Quote by Harry Shearer

'Leave It To Beaver' is a fairly famous show in America, but I don't think it travelled. It was one of those typical '50s family comedies. I was in the pilot episode as sort of the dark presence: my character was called Eddie Haskill.
I'm at a little loss in terms of my Leave It To Beaver expertise, since I never watched an episode of the show - so the cast in the pilot could have been Martians or they could have been the regular cast for all I know.
The last episode of Dallas was in '1991.' Unfortunately, it was a terrible episode to end the show on: it was a sort of 'It's a Wonderful Life' with Larry as the Jimmy Stewart character. In that episode, I was an ineffectual-schlep kind of brother, who got divorced three or four times and was a Las Vegas reject.
I was playing this sort of asshole actor [in The Jenny McCarthy Show]. And we shot the pilot, and it was a guaranteed go. It was going to be 24 [episodes] on the air. No questions from NBC. And we shot the pilot, and I was in Toronto doing a movie, and I got a call saying they cut the character, that I was off the show.
The second episode of any new show can be tough. You have about a week to top the well-crafted and polished pilot episode that was written over six months.
I have a show on MTV called 'Zach Stone Is Gonna Be Famous.' I think that's a secret to a vast majority of America.
[Lauren Ambrose's] character [in Can't Hardly Wait] feels real and unexaggerated and becomes sort of a heroine archetype. I think that was cool. It wasn't in every one of those comedies.
We're gonna play a little bit of a game here [Person of Interest movie]. Greg and I felt like we had responsibility when we wrapped up the pilot, to have a roadmap for where the show went. When we pitched the pilot, we knew what we wanted the last episode to be, the last image, I think we even know what the last song is.
I did a great show Off-Broadway called Leave It To Beaver Is Dead that was at the Public Theater in New York. It was written by Des McAnuff, who's an illustrious director now, and it starred... Well, I was in it, Mandy Patinkin, Dianne Wiest, Saul Rubinek, and Maury Chaykin. It was an amazing show. But it was definitely ahead of its time, and people didn't quite get it.
There are no 'Leave It to Beaver' families. Everybody's family's got that one nut that comes to the family reunion and you're like, OK, that guy's here.
I've been watching 'The Cosby Show' and 'Roseanne' a lot right now, and those work so well because they're not, like, jokey comedies; they are coming from real characters. We want our show to be like that. A family show.
'The X-Files' from the beginning was a very visual show, and with Bob Mandel directing the pilot and Dan Sackheim being involved in the production of the pilot and directing the first episode, they brought a visual style to it that was elaborated on by so many good directors.
If my life is motivated by my ambition to leave a legacy, what I'll probably leave as a legacy is ambition. But if my life is motivated by the power of the Spirit in me, if I live with the awareness of the indwelling Christ, if I allow His presence to guide my actions, to guide my motives, those sort of things. That's the only time I think we really leave a great legacy.
The dark comedies tend to be in a non-releasable area. There can be romantic comedies. There can be dramas. But there's no 'dark comedy' inbox for the advertising.
To me, there were comedies that should go up for Oscars. I think Eddie Murphy in 'The Nutty Professor' was one of the greatest acting performances of all time, but it'd never be recognized that way. They always go for De Niro and Pacino, but Eddie Murphy played seven different people!
The one thing that we wanted to make sure in the pilot [of "Mary and Jane"] is that we could go everywhere. Part of the fun of them being a delivery service is that they go to different areas episode to episode. We do have an episode in the beach and there is an episode in the luxury rehab. It's all different kinds of things we are making fun of in LA.
These types of films that are psychologically sort of dark at times, I find extremely exciting to do because there's always something to think about. There's nothing more boring than to show up on set and say a line and know that your character means exactly what they say. It's interesting to have an unreliable narrator in a film and that's what both of those films have been.
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