Daily Inspiration Quote by Samuel Goldwyn

A producer griping about television’s damage to writing is its own little punchline, and that tension is the engine of Samuel Goldwyn’s line. “Raised” should be “lowered,” of course, but the stumble is part of the bite: he turns progress talk inside out. Television, the shiny new miracle, isn’t elevating culture; it’s industrializing it. The phrase “a new low” lands like a slap because it mimics the boosterish language of innovation while delivering a verdict of decline.

Goldwyn came out of Hollywood’s studio system, where writing was already a managed commodity, but TV accelerated the logic. By the 1950s and 60s, television demanded relentless volume, predictable formats, clean act breaks, and dialogue that could survive household noise. Under those constraints, writing isn’t treated as literature or even as craft; it’s treated as throughput. Goldwyn’s complaint isn’t just snobbery about a “lower” medium. It’s anxiety about how the medium changes the incentives: speed over revision, familiarity over risk, clarity over complexity, sponsors and schedules over idiosyncratic voice.

The subtext is also defensive. Film people positioned cinema as an art form just as TV started pulling audiences, money, and prestige into the living room. Calling television a cultural downgrade is a way to keep film’s status intact, and to recast competition as corruption. Even now, in an era of “prestige TV,” the line endures because it names a durable fear: when entertainment becomes omnipresent and frictionless, writing can start behaving like content.