Roberts, having largely been "a stage actor, accustomed as he was to a rigorous diet of the classics" and to freely move about from part to part, found the "transition to a television series", playing the same character, "without costume changes," a difficult one. "It was perhaps not surprising that, despite enormous success, he left "Bonanza" after the 1964–65 season, criticizing the show's simple-minded content and lack of minority actors...". It particularly distressed him that his character, a man in his 30s, had to defer continually to the wishes of his widowed father, and he reportedly disliked the series itself, calling it "junk" television and accusing NBC of "perpetuating banality and contributing to the dehumanization of the industry." The equally self-critical Roberts ("I guess I'll never be satisfied with my own work"), "had long disdained the medium's commercialization of his craft and its mass production, assembly-line mindset." Frustrated with "Bonanza" and angry, he told a reporter in 1965, "I feel I'm an aristocrat in my field of endeavor. My being part of "Bonanza" was like Isaac Stern sitting in with Lawrence Welk".