Twitter is bringing people back to watching television live…"

This isn’t brand-new, but it’s worth watching if you missed it the first time around. At the D8 Conference this year, Kara Swisher talked to Steven Levitan, the executive producer of the show Modern Family. Now, I wish I could snap the player below to 4:09, which is where the good bit starts. Alas, you’ll have to scrub it there yourself:

Levitan says:

When the show airs on the East Coast, it’s six o’clock our time [in LA]. We hit Twitter, and we search for “Modern Family”—the writers, we do this—and we call it Google Mirth. People are watching the show, and people are, in real-time… they’re basically… they’re laughing on Twitter. “Ah haha! Love that line!” We get instant feedback.

There’s something great about that—about people at the absolute top of their game, with one of the biggest shows on TV, still waiting with bated breath, watching Twitter, wondering, as we always do, no matter how successful we get: “What does everybody think?”

Here’s another line from Levitan, via the official liveblog. This is something that I say a lot, too:

I think what [Twitter is] doing is bringing people back to watching television live. Because they want to be a part of that conversation.

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