Daily Inspiration Quote by David Ogden Stiers

Television, Stiers implies, isn’t a meritocracy so much as a casino with call times. Calling it an “operating system” is the tell: this isn’t a passing gripe from an actor who didn’t get the part, it’s a survival setting you install in your brain before you even step on set. If you expect logic, fairness, or linear progress, you’ll burn out. If you assume volatility, you can keep working.

“Crapshoot” does double duty. It’s not just that pilots live and die on ratings; it’s that everything around them is noisy and uncontrollable: network politics, shifting audience tastes, executive whims, a last-minute time-slot shuffle, an unexpected cultural moment that makes one kind of show feel suddenly ancient. Even good performances can disappear in the churn. Stiers, best known to many as Maj. Winchester on MASH, came up in an era when TV could make you ubiquitous and still treat you as disposable. The business rewards stamina and adaptability as much as talent.

The subtext is both bracing and oddly liberating. If the system is fundamentally a gamble, then failure stops being a personal verdict. You can do excellent work and still lose; you can do mediocre work and still win. That mindset protects the artist’s dignity while quietly indicting the industry’s mythology that “quality rises.” Stiers isn’t romanticizing the grind; he’s naming the machinery, and advising you to stop confusing the roll of the dice with your worth.