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Tom Shales, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post television critic who brought incisive and sharp wit to coverage of the small screen and portrayed the medium as an increasingly powerful cultural force, for better or worse, has died Jan. 13 at a hospital in Fairfax County, Virginia. He was 79 years old.
The cause was complications from Covid and kidney failure, said his supervisor Victor Herfurth.
Television critics in New York and Los Angeles have traditionally had greater influence in show business than one in Washington's entertainment district, but Mr. Shales proved a formidable exception for more than three decades.
Beginning in 1977, he was the Post's chief critic at a newspaper still basking in the glow of its Watergate fame, his column was widely read, and his incisive commentary on TV stars, trends, and network executives brought him national attention.
Mr. Shales reported extensively on all forms of the medium, from nature documentaries to late-night talk shows, network sitcoms and cable dramas, from “Saturday Night Live” to pompous State of the Union addresses, from saucy morning shows to “reality.” “Shows he called “Humiliation Television.”
His work elevated television coverage and criticism beyond mere ruminations on plot lines and gags. He described shows, whether serious or silly, as pieces of a cultural mosaic worthy of deeper consideration.
In 1988, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism – becoming the fourth television reviewer to win the top prize in the journalism category – for his work that not only evaluated programs for their escapist and artistic values, but also illuminated how broadcast reporting affects the public Perception can influence news and events.
He was a pioneer in analyzing political debates as a kind of prime-time television spectacle. He “explored not only their political significance, but also their media significance,” said Ron Simon, curator of television and radio at the Paley Center for Media in New York. “He understood the profound cultural changes. He tried to understand how television affects every aspect of our lives.”
Unlike the first generation of television critics, for whom theater and cinema served as quality benchmarks, Mr. Shales grew up with the medium. He recalled being mesmerized at a young age watching “I Love Lucy,” “Playhouse 90” and “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” on his family's 14-inch RCA console-mounted television made of mahogany.
Mr. Shales became a professional critic when cable television was in its infancy. After television made the leap into social commentary with shows like All in the Family, the still dominant networks generally returned to a more predictable sitcom and police series. Mr. Shales, however, was among those who recognized the change that had begun.
The potential of television – and its influence on the national zeitgeist – had been unleashed, he said. He treated the medium accordingly, with a highly entertaining style that could combine the bite of a stand-up comic with the sober majesty of a media scholar.
In a 1981 column, he criticized the “bonzo journalism” of network television's enthusiasm for ambush-style investigative reporting: “Of course, one is reminded of the old story about the dog chasing cars – what do they do when they do?” Catch one?” wrestle him to the ground? Dragging him to the Hoosegow?”
When star CBS News correspondent Dan Rather traveled to war-torn Afghanistan for “60 Minutes” in 1980, Mr. Shales gave him the memorable nickname “Gunga Dan.” The conspicuous donning of a man's cap called Pakol and robes made Rather “look like an extra from 'Dr. Zhivago,'” Mr. Shales explained. He regularly mocked ABC's “Good Morning America” host David Hartman as “Mr. Potato Head” and NBC News workaholic Tom Brokaw as “Duncan the Wonder Horse,” popularizing unflattering nicknames given by others.
His columns drew the ire of the network's executives, who, according to Shales, often felt that they were above any form of criticism and despised those who did it for a living.
Bill Leonard, president of CBS News, told Time magazine that Mr. Shales “uses the English language like a sword to punch holes in whatever he feels like.” Roone Arledge, who was president of ABC News and the Dismissing Shales as “Rooney Tunes,” Mr. noted that the critic “loves to make catchy little phrases that demean.”
Mr. Shales responded that he was only showing the bosses the kind of contempt that the networks seem to have for audiences. “People who respect television are the ones I respect,” he added. “It’s those who wipe their feet on it that I’m likely to write nasty things about.”
But producers like Grant Tinker (“The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Hill Street Blues”) championed Mr. Shales as an important voice for “better” television. It helped that Mr. Shales had praised “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” as a sitcom that “expanded the dimensions of the form and remained largely a model of civility in a medium that often seems largely populated by louts.”
A recurring target for Mr. Shales was Kathie Lee Gifford, the Perma-Smile co-host with Regis Philbin on the syndicated morning show “Live With Regis and Kathy Lee.” He looked at her like a pebble in his shoe, annoyed by relentless momentum, boundless self-adoration, and sweet sentimentality. Mr. Shales particularly enjoyed thrashing Giffords Christmas specialties in the 1990s.
“That ghastly Gifford grin, ear to ear and back again, seems suffused with self-esteem and almost blinding in its showbiz mendacity,” he wrote in a review of “Kathie Lee: Home for Christmas,” in which both of them “mercilessly exploited “became” children and her husband, former football star Frank Gifford. He compared the special thing to Soviet torture techniques and directed his sympathy towards their offspring.
“Imagine the therapy bills these children will pay in the years to come,” he wrote.
Mr. Shales, with a playful wink, pretended to be reserved in his harshest criticisms.
“No one believes this when I tell them, but after I've written a column that's been particularly mean to some poor, helpless, fabulously overpaid, dirty rich celebrity, I always ask the editors if I'm 'too.' “was mean” and whether the column should be “toned down,” he wrote in a 2002 essay for Electronic Media. “Nine times out of 10 over the years the answer has been, 'No, that's not too mean.' If anything, it's not mean enough.' I was almost always encouraged to be meaner. See, it’s really all the editors’ fault.”
Thomas William Shales was born on November 3, 1944 in Elgin, Illinois, about 40 miles west of Chicago. His father ran a towing service and an auto body shop, and in the 1960s he became a part-time mayor. His mother was the manager of a clothing store.
In addition to serving as co-editor of the high school newspaper, Mr. Shales worked at a local radio station as a disc jockey, writer and announcer. He attended Elgin Community College before transferring to American University, where he rose to editor-in-chief of the campus newspaper and wrote film reviews.
After earning a bachelor's degree in journalism in 1968, Mr. Shales became entertainment editor of the short-lived DC Examiner, a free tabloid newspaper. An editor in the Post's style department had noticed his quirky print editions, but it wasn't until 1972 that he was offered a job as a general assignment reporter.
“They told me that I didn't seem impressed enough by the prospect of working at the Postal Service,” he recalled to Washingtonian magazine, “and they certainly weren't impressed by my educational background.” I was didn’t go to Harvard.”
Although he excelled in non-entertainment pieces in “Style,” Mr. Shales stood out most for his enthusiasm for — and strong opinions about — popular culture. This quality was evident in the film criticism he wrote regularly for NPR's “Morning Edition” in the 1970s and for many years thereafter.
He was an early and staunch supporter of filmmaker George Lucas' sci-fi adventure Star Wars (1977), calling it “the best children's film for adults since The Wizard of Oz.” “Mr. Shales continued the review with an avalanche of puns (“undoubtedly great…unquestionably fantastic”) and cultural references to Jonathan Swift's “Gulliver's Travels,” Homer's “Odyssey,” and the battle scenes in the war propaganda film “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” and “Tarzan.” by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
When Mr. Shales became chief television critic in 1977, style editor Shelby Coffey III was his strongest supporter and made him a great asset. In an interview for this obituary, Coffey remembered Mr. Shales as a marvel to watch if the deadline was met: “He came in with an hour to spare, wrote in a wild burst of energy, and delivered his story cleanly—always 10 minutes late, pure principle.”
Over the years, Mr. Shales profiled television stars and network bosses and commented on the rise of gratuitous violence and sexual content. When asked by a Post reader what he considered quality television, Mr. Shales brought it down to a question of artistic honesty, regardless of genre. “I just guess that it succeeds on its own terms,” he replied, “that it stays true to an obvious purpose, has something unique to say, or, I guess, just succeeds as pleasantly frivolous escapism.”
As a result, Mr. Shales effusively praised programs that defied convention and went beyond lazy tropes. He wrote admiringly of late-night host David Letterman, whom he praised for his wry irreverence and intolerance of show business phonies. HBO's “The Larry Sanders Show,” he wrote in 1998, was “the best original sitcom in the history of cable television,” a talk show satire “about show business and the egomania that thrives there like scum in a pond.”
“But the show,” he continued, “has also always been about people and their dreams, the lengths they go to to get them, and of course what idiots we mere mortals are—except it's HBO is, so they would use a much stronger word than “fools”. ”
Viewer ratings sometimes overrode Mr. Shales' judgments. He dismissed the hit “Grey's Anatomy” as a rehash of all previous medical dramas and called the popular sitcom “Friends” a flat-out mediocrity.
His scathing reviews of the Fox teen soap “The OC” and the Washington-set CBS crime drama “The District” were met with unkindness by the shows' respective writers: the former featured an incontinent hospital patient, to the disgrace of Mr. called Shales; In the second part, the main character instructs his puppy to urinate based on a review from Mr. Shales.
“I think all the other TV critics are going to be jealous, and they probably are,” he later joked to late-night host Conan O'Brien. “Because it’s kind of an honor to be ruined by a TV show that you ruined.”
“It all sounds very sick to me,” O’Brien quipped.
Mr. Shales once had a dark opinion of O'Brien, calling him a “fidgety puppet.” [with] dark, bulbous little eyes like a rabbit,” who presided over an “hour of aimless dawdling disguised as a television program.”
Over time, Mr. Shales revised his assessment of O'Brien, praising his humility, restraint and intelligence, and even agreed to appear on his show in 2003, reviewing it in real time and saying that the only low point in the evening was a “tired one.” “old television critic” present.
Mr. Shales bought out of The Post in 2006 and remained under contract for another four years before being unceremoniously ousted, he said, for a salary of about $400,000 a year.
In addition to his work for The Post, he wrote about film and television for TelevisionWeek, Huffington Post (now HuffPost), and Roger Ebert's website. His books included Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (2002) and Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN (2011), both oral histories written with journalist James Andrew Miller.
For all the gregariousness of his writing style and his extensive source of industry sources, Mr. Shales did not find the newsroom a welcoming place and largely maintained a social distance from his colleagues. He once described himself as He was addicted to M&Ms and struggled with his weight most of his life. He never married and had no immediate survivors.
Mr. Shales spent his career in a high-profile but eternally frustrating job. His hopes of finding originality, risk-taking and even beauty in the television industry were often disappointed. But he continued, out of faith in a medium he deeply adored. As he explained in an online post chat in 2007, “I still have the foolish belief that television gets better before it gets worse, and then when it gets worse, it gets better again.”