Love Quote by Aaron Spelling

Spelling isn’t pining for a format so much as for a kind of power that the format used to grant: the ability to treat television as a weekly costume closet. The anthology was TV’s original license to roam. One hour you could do noir, the next a ghost story, the next a social parable, and the audience followed because the brand was the producer’s taste, not a character’s long arc.

When he says “be in every division of television,” it’s less nostalgia than a producer’s map of the medium as an industrial grid. Anthologies let a studio hedge risk, test genres, and surf trends without marrying them. They’re also talent magnets: writers and directors can swing for the fences without inheriting last week’s continuity. Spelling, a master of repeatable premises and durable hits, sounds almost restless here, craving the freedom to be experimental inside a commercial machine.

The plaintive “We don’t have any anthologies anymore, do we?” lands like a soft accusation. By the late-network era and into prestige cable, TV rewarded the opposite: ongoing story engines that create habit, fandom, and predictable ad (or subscription) value. Serialization isn’t just an artistic choice; it’s a retention strategy. Spelling’s question exposes that shift in who TV is built for: not the viewer’s curiosity, but the platform’s need for loyalty.

There’s irony in the speaker, too. Spelling helped define the long-running, brand-safe series model. His wistfulness reads as a veteran recognizing that the medium’s most “creative” structure was also its most brutally pragmatic.