A Quote by Ken Marino

To go from working with a group of people in a sketch-comedy show on a small network, where it was all about just creating funny stuff, to being on a network show, and the pressures of that, and getting to know the new people who were involved in it. There was a learning curve for me. But it was an education.
I've been on my share of network dramas and comedies, and the problem sometimes in a network is they have a single-minded focus on making the show true to whatever genre it is. If you're on a drama, it better be procedural, it better fulfill all the demands of a procedural show, and you better keep those episodes independent, so if I'm watching the show in seven years as its syndicated on some other cable network, I don't have to know what happened before or after the episode. If you're on a comedy, everything has to be funny and wacky and zany.
Rebuilding a network is a slow, brick-by-brick process. It's not just creating a hit show - it's building shows to back up that hit show; it's creating an identity of success so that people want their shows on your network.
I think when you're on a network show, it's crazy how different it is... just being on a network show that reaches that many people. It's not like I'm very famous, but seemingly overnight, I would get recognized more, and it was really weird.
It's very, very hard to create something that is big these days because you have niche markets - and, you don't necessarily need to be big; the show is specifically created for a small group of people. You know, if it's on the USA network, well, then a small group of people is fine.
I respect the hell out of everyone who does a network show. That is a marathon. It's so many episodes, and it can be a meat grinder. Anyone making a network show, and on top of that making a very good network show, that's an insane feat of Herculean endurance and fortitude.
You do what you're supposed to do, but you have to be honest about what they're doing. When you do a comedy show on a network the problem is there are going to be a bunch of people who aren't comedians that are going to tell you what's funny.
[Exorcist ] is given all of us a great opportunity to show something new on network TV, in terms of the quality of it. It feels much bigger than a network show.
I love every aspect of the show. I've been very involved. It was important for me to be very involved in, you know, all of the creative elements. And so, you know, it - David, you know, being brought onto the show, you know, that - I always just wanted to make sure that we maintained the sophistication and intelligence of (the) - and the comedy that we were able to establish in the mini-series.
When we came to the network, it was a very interesting time where Portlandia had just come on the air and had been very, very successful. I think people had Portlandia-sized expectations for Comedy Bang! Bang!, especially after the first episode was sampled by quite a large number of people. I remember getting the ratings after the first episode, and the network was over the moon about it. And then the second episode tanked so hard. Like, no one watched it. It was a resounding, "Hey, a bunch of people tried your show, and they all hate it!"
As network administrator I can take down the network with one keystroke. It's just like being a doctor but without getting gooky stuff on my paws.
And that's the thing about our show: what are they going to do put on the poster? I don't know. It's always easier when you have someone like Cedric the Entertainer where you can go, "You know this guy. You love this guy. Watch his sketch show." And then people tune in and go, "I though I knew that guy. I don't love that guy in a sketch show."
I would call it a comedy variety show. We have some people just doing straight standup. We usually try to have one musical act of sort. So its just people being funny in different ways, not just sketch, not just standup, not just characters, all of those things.
A couple of friends and I started a sketch comedy group when we were teenagers, just for fun and to start creating stuff. It was a blast.
Later, when I was at Caesar's Palace, and [Joe and Gil Cates] were trying to get me to have opening acts for the show, they gave me a list of people, and Rosie O'Donnell was one of them. I said, "I don't really need any opening acts. I have funny stuff in the show, and I do a lot of comedy and stuff."
There was a male sketch group in my college. I was like why isn't there a female sketch group? So then I started doing sketch comedy and all that stuff. It just happened.
I started working at Bravo in 2005, when I was offered a job by Lauren Zalaznick, the network's chairman. She encouraged me to start a blog. I wrote behind-the-scenes gossip about 'Battle of the Network Reality Stars,' the first show I took on as head of current programming.
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