Happiness Quote by Roma Downey

Humiliation is doing the heavy lifting here, and Roma Downey knows it. “We were the laughingstock of that first season” isn’t just a recollection of bad reviews; it’s a social sentence. “Laughingstock” implies a room full of gatekeepers and peers treating a new show like a punchline, the kind of early-career verdict that can quietly rewrite your self-image. By opening with that bruise, she primes the audience to feel the stakes: this wasn’t a mild stumble, it was public, communal dismissal.

Then she flips the camera angle. “With great relish” is the tell. It’s not simple gratitude; it’s a controlled, almost mischievous pleasure in the reversal. “Relish” suggests she’s savoring the moment the culture had to eat its earlier joke. The award itself matters less than what it represents: legitimacy delivered by mass attention, packaged in the most mainstream of artifacts, TV Guide. That detail is shrewd. TV Guide isn’t an elite tastemaker; it’s the thermostat of popular approval. The subtext is a quiet jab at the people who “laughed” first: you don’t get to define success when the audience has already voted.

Contextually, it lands as a classic showbiz arc - the industry’s short memory versus the audience’s slow-building loyalty. Downey frames endurance as its own comeback: not loud revenge, just the sweet, patient satisfaction of being underestimated and then indisputable.