The Revolution Was Televised Quotes

“Once upon a time, mystery fans had to solve puzzles on their own; now, you not only didn’t need to be the one to solve it, you didn’t even need to be hanging around on the website where someone else had solved it. An Ana Lucia flashback episode in the second season showed Jack’s father, Christian, visiting a blonde Australian woman. Not long after it aired, I saw someone on the Television Without Pity message boards passing along a theory they had read on a different site suggesting that this woman was Claire’s mother, that Christian was her father, and that Jack and Claire were unwitting half-siblings. I hadn’t connected those dots myself, but the theory immediately made sense to me. When I interviewed Cuse that summer, he mentioned Christian Shephard, and I said, “And he’s Claire’s father, too, right?” Cuse looked like he was about to have a heart attack.”
― Alan Sepinwall, The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever

“We’d been going home with television every night for years, but suddenly we had reason to respect it in the morning.”
― Alan Sepinwall, The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever

“Milch had a bigger cast, a bigger set (on the Melody Ranch studio, where Gene Autry had filmed very different Westerns decades earlier), and more creative freedom than he’d ever had before. There were no advertisers to answer to, and HBO was far more hands-off than the executives at NBC or ABC had been. And as a result, there was even less pretense of planning than there had been on NYPD Blue, and more improvisation. There were scripts for the first four episodes of Season 1, and after that, most of the series was written on the fly, with the cast and crew often not learning what they would be doing until the day before (if that). As Jody Worth recalls, the Deadwood writers would gather each morning for a long conversation: “We would talk about where we were going in the episode, and a lot of talk that had nothing to do with anything, a lot of Professor Milch talk, all over the map talk, which I enjoyed.” Out of those daily conversations came the decisions on what scenes to write that day, to be filmed the day after. There was no system to it, no order, and the actors would be given scenes completely out of context from the rest of the episode.”
― Alan Sepinwall, The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever

“In that season’s finale, Milch wanted Sipowicz — who by this point had suffered the deaths of his eldest son, his partner Bobby, and his wife, and whose young son Theo was facing a medical crisis — to enter the hospital chapel and rant about all that God has taken from him. Tinker was on set. Franz was on set. The entire crew was on set. And, as usual by that point, there was no script. Milch ambled onto the set, realized everyone was waiting on him, announced that he needed someone to take dictation, and launched into a stream-of-consciousness assault on the Almighty, sounding very much like Sipowicz. Minutes later, Franz performed it word-for-word.”
― Alan Sepinwall, The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever

“With Milch fully in charge of the writing process — or, in many cases, the rewriting process — it became all-consuming. When Milch and Lewis replaced Bochco on Hill Street, Milch had developed a working method that he would continue to use for the next several decades: he would lie on the floor of the writers’ room (Milch has a bad back, which can make sitting for long periods difficult) while a typist scrolled through each script at his instruction; Milch made changes line by line, word by word. By the early days of NYPD Blue, it was understood that regardless of whose name was on the script, the bulk of the words — and, almost as importantly, their order— came from Milch.”
― Alan Sepinwall, The Revolution Was Televised: The Cops, Crooks, Slingers and Slayers Who Changed TV Drama Forever

“There’s already a school of thought—one that a book like this admittedly plays into—arguing that true quality television didn’t exist before The Sopranos”
― Alan Sepinwall, The Revolution Was Televised: How The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Lost, and Other Groundbreaking Dramas Changed TV Forever

“This is perhaps the biggest departure from the science fiction norm. We do not have ‘the cocky guy,’ ‘the fast-talker,’ ‘the brain,’ ‘the wacky alien sidekick’ or any of the other usual characters who populate a space series. Our characters are living, breathing people with all the emotional complexity and contradictions present in quality dramas like The West Wing or The Sopranos. In this way, we hope to challenge our audience in ways that other genre pieces do not. We want the audience to connect with the characters of Galactica as people. Our characters are not super-heroes. They are not an elite. They are everyday people caught up in an enormous cataclysm and trying to survive it as best they can. “They are you and me.”
― Alan Sepinwall, The Revolution Was Televised: How The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Lost, and Other Groundbreaking Dramas Changed TV Forever