Doing a TV show, you're on an assembly line and it's as cut and dry as that. There are some shows that are exceptions. There are producers that want really special things.
Career wise, I'm looking into different opportunities to do a TV show, but in some way that's not a goal in itself. To me, the goal is creating content and doing fun stuff that I'm proud to show. I don't want to do a TV show for the sake of doing it.
Obviously, in this day and age, with the TV shows, there are some really interesting ones. I'm not that interested in going and doing a network show, but like everybody else, trying to find something good.
Like we were saying, the fact that the relationships on the show are love-based, and in the sense that I wasn't aware of how special it was in contrast to a lot of the other TV shows that are on right now. It was our audience members that pointed out the love that you see in the show is special.
There is no longer one way to consume TV. Some shows you want to watch live, some shows you only discover through streaming, some shows you just feel you need to DVR.
I do remember the moment when, as a child, I realized that the things we call 'TV shows' are really just the stuff that gets put between commercials. Later, I came to see that the kinds of things that get on 'free' TV are shows that help sell products.
I love doing [stand-up]. I love making people laugh no matter how. Whether it's a commercial, or a TV show, or a reality show, or a talk show, or a special, or a book. However I can make people laugh, that's what I want to do.
The thing is, with doing our TV show 'Strictly,' and 'Stand Up For Cancer' and any shows I do for TV, it's always so positive.
I'm really not that special. Really, I'm not. I was on a big TV show, but it was just a TV show.
As an actor, you very rarely have the experience of picking up a script and getting a few pages into it and realizing that what you're holding in your hands is not just a role on a TV show, but it's one of those special parts that comes along, once or twice in a career. If you're lucky, you get an opportunity to do something really memorable and to be part of one of those rare shows that passes into that special category.
Studios are an assembly line. They can be a very good assembly line. As a producer, you concentrate on one project at a time. As an executive, you're in charge of a slate.
The scheduling thing is really weird with TV shows. Certain projects haven't been able to work out because of the schedule, so some of it is out of your control. You don't have very many opportunities. There isn't much time, so you want to make sure you're going to be doing something that you really feel good about or that you're going to have a good creative experience doing. You're taking up vacation time from your job, so you want it to be meaningful.
The idea is to take it a step forward and innovate. Or else why am I doing it? I don't want to be just another can in the assembly line. I want to create - do something that is totally different and unusual.
My favorite show of my father Aaron Spelling is probably a show that was his favorite and that was a show called Family. He was the most proud of that show because, you know, my dad kind of got a bad wrap, I think. A lot of times people would say oh he just makes jiggle TV and it's all for entertainment purposes. But he did some really amazing shows as well that he was really proud of, that people kind overlooked. And Family was one of them.
But I really am very active in the choice of the line producer with the producer of record and the distributing company, because I've had some terrible, terrible experiences with some line producers, particularly in cable.
I'm just ah, actually developing a tv show for HBO, and I'm directing a film this summer, and actually I'm doing some live shows out in western Canada.
This whole thing about reality television to me is really indicative of America saying we're not satisfied just watching television, we want to star in our own TV shows. We want you to discover us and put us in your own TV show, and we want television to be about us, finally.