Mike Fleiss Quotes

If I have any skill at all, it's the ability to come up with ideas that get people talking. With so many choices out there for viewers, you've got to get people talking about your show or you have no chance at all.

I wouldn't want to do a show that looked and smelled just like another show. So you really have to force yourself to think hard about what's like what hasn't been seen, what hasn't been done. Particularly for network, because on cable there's a little, and I haven't really done much cable at all, only two or three series, but there's a luxury there where if your show fails, nobody really notices.

Certainly in the early days when I was doing a lot of shows for Fox and I was working with my friend Mike Darnell, we would sit there and try to think of crazy ideas and we would try to warm up each other. And then whenever we thought we'd have something that could be produced into a television show, we'd always say, well, can we really put that on television? And then when we would say that, we said, now we have to put it on television. Because if it was questionable about whether or not it was appropriate for viewers, then we knew we had a chance to be a success.

We did a whole send-out when she died, we did a tribute to Magic at the end of one of the episodes and stuff," Fleiss recalls. "So I've always had Rottweilers with me on the sets. I have one now. They're great dogs.

[Berkeley, Professor Hubert Dreyfus] always contended … for very philosophical and biological reasons … [AI was] never going to be able to do what a human being could do, but they could achieve mediocrity as a simulation.