Television
Improvisation was originally rarely used on dramatic television. A major exception was the situation comedy Mork and Mindy where star Robin Williams, famed for this kind of performing, was allotted specific sections in each episode where he was allowed to perform freely.
In the 1990s, a TV show called Whose Line Is It Anyway? popularized shortform comedic improvisation; the original version aired on British television, but it was later revived and popularized in the United States, with Drew Carey as its host. With improvisation becoming a more common aspect of television, there have been television shows which have garnered great success by utilizing partial improvisation to create longer-form programs with more dramatic flavor while some shows are completely improvised in terms of lines, including: The Office, Parks and Recreation, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Significant Others, The Loop, Sons & Daughters, 10 Items or Less, Dog Bites Man, Halfway Home, Reno 911!,The League, Free Ride, Campus Ladies, Lovespring International, Players, and After Lately.
In Canada, the Global Television soap opera Train 48, based on the Australian series Going Home, uses a form of structured improvisation, in which actors improvise dialog from written plot outlines. Australia's Thank God You're Here is a game show where celebrities are put into scenes they know nothing about and have to improvise.
Read more about this topic: Improvisation
Famous quotes containing the word television:
“We cannot spare our children the influence of harmful values by turning off the television any more than we can keep them home forever or revamp the world before they get there. Merely keeping them in the dark is no protection and, in fact, can make them vulnerable and immature.”
—Polly Berrien Berends (20th century)
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“The television critic, whatever his pretensions, does not labour in the same vineyard as those he criticizes; his grapes are all sour.”
—Frederic Raphael (b. 1931)