— No, no, no! Course he's not the boy's father. Look at turn-ups on his jeans!
— I knew it was dangerous. Getting you into crap telly.
Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950s. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.
Annie: It's so clean out here.
Alvie: Because they don't throw garbage away. They make it into TV shows.
I was just glad to watch TV and, for once, not be in a world of crap.
When you’re young, you look at television and think, there’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.
Then she turns on the television, some soap opera, you know, real people pretending to be fake people with made-up problems being watched by real people to forget their real problems.
There's the television. It's all right there — all right there. Look, listen, kneel, pray. Commercials! We're not productive anymore. We don't make things anymore. It's all automated. What are we for then? We're consumers. Yeah. Okay, okay. Buy a lot of stuff, you're a good citizen. But if you don't buy a lot of stuff, if you don't, what are you then, I ask you? What? Mentally ill. Fact, Jim, fact — if you don't buy things: toilet paper, new cars, computerized yo-yos, electrically-operated sexual devices, stereo systems with brain-implanted headphones, screwdrivers with miniature built-in radar devices, voice-activated computers...
— There was this really hot teller at the bank. And she didn't ask me to do it with her in the vault.
— Same thing happened to me. Pizza delivery girl comes over, gives me the pizza and leaves!
— No "Nice apartment, bet the bedrooms are huge"?
— Nothing!
— You know what? We have to turn off the porn.
Without TV, it's hard to tell when one day ends and the other begins.
— Let's just leave the kids here.
— Here in the room? By themselves?
— No... with the television.
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