Robert Thompson Time Quotations

New Year's Day was the perfect time for football because you could roll out of bed and you could start watching football, even before you manage to mix your aspirin and water. The second (of January) is just not the same. Some people are going to have to get up. The dynamic gets broken. The whole calculus changes.

It is one of the few shows on American television, especially after you get past those first couple of weeks, where really little kids love it, grandma loves it. It's got the kind of wide appeal we used to see all the time on network TV that we very seldom see anymore.

I think it's now beyond a trend. It's now a form, just like soap operas, doctor shows, or legal shows. I doubt you, me, our children or our grandchildren will know a time without it.

I think we have yet to realize how much we are going to miss that. I don't think it's a total coincidence that it's happening at the same time there's an increasingly divisive nature in the country. What the consensus medium of television used to do, and radio before that, was to provide this enormous center that everybody had to go to now and then. ... Now, there is a lack of cultural consensus that even extends to what we consider the body of facts we used to debate.

Elvis Presley Ate Here' is the cultural equivalent of 'George Washington Slept Here', ... Every time a place makes a claim that Elvis ate there, it becomes a memorial to his memory, to his life and to his legend.

There simply are not a lot of really good movies that people were interested in. Every time a new element enters the field -- movies have to be better to attract people.

It's pathetic. It's pathetic that someone in a time especially right after Katrina, seeing people suffer, would take advantage of the system.

By the time this happened, the whole Martha Stewart style was beginning to show its age. What is strange is her being elevated beyond her fan base to world-class celebrity, thanks to a trial and conviction, and brought to a place in our culture that is much bigger than before.

The idea of taking this very modern 21st century story of tender love between two cowboys and putting it into the time period of an old Western opens up the floodgates for telling jokes. Comedians can't resist because we all know what a cowboy movie is and this challenges it.

These kinds of characters are so satisfying to male viewers because culture has told them to be powerful and effective and to get things done, and at the same time they're living, operating and working in places that are constantly defying that.