Love Quote by Jennifer Saunders

Protectionism is often dismissed as preciousness, but Saunders frames it as a moral obligation: stewardship over a thing people already trust. Her language is deliberately blunt and bodily: a bad movie doesn’t merely disappoint, it “soils” the show. That verb carries the shame of contamination, as if a once-intimate relationship between audience and characters can be permanently dirtied by one cynical cash-in. In an era when every beloved property is a potential franchise “universe,” Saunders treats adaptation as risk, not reward.

The subtext is a quiet indictment of the entertainment machine. Films and adverts aren’t inherently evil; they’re shorthand for incentives that distort. A movie demands bigger stakes, slicker arcs, a more exportable version of the humor. An advert demands obedience to a brand voice. In both cases, the characters stop being people with specific comic logic and start becoming mascots. Saunders’ insistence that you “can’t compromise” reads less like artistic ego than a refusal to let commerce rewrite the emotional contract the show established.

There’s also a canny understanding of where comedy lives. Great sitcom characters are precision-built: their contradictions, rhythms, and limits generate the jokes. “Integrity” here isn’t a lofty abstraction; it’s craft. Alter the characters to fit a new format, and you don’t just dilute them, you break the engine. Saunders is defending not nostalgia but the conditions that made the work sharp in the first place.