Tom Shales
Tom Shales
Thomas William "Tom" Shalesis an American critic of television programming and operations. He is best known as TV critic for The Washington Post; in 1988, Shales received the Pulitzer Prize. He also writes a column for the television news trade publication NewsPro, published by Crain Communications...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth3 November 1948
CountryUnited States of America
media television matter
No matter how much programming improves, however, media savants tend to see the medium living out numbered days. It's feared that the Internet will do to TV what TV did to the movies in the 1950s. But instead of panicking, the networks are finding ways to co-opt the Web.
drama long people
Crime dramas will never go away as long as people turn to television for, among other things, reassurance and comfort.
christian hungry-lion mtv
Perhaps Western civilization is in a post-decline phase, or maybe the decline is just taking a really long time, like the Roman Empire's did. The Romans had gladiators and Christian-hungry lions and that sort of thing. We have MTV.
fun fever agonizing
In the 500-channel universe, which may, of course, contain many more channels than 500, the fun never stops - fun at such a fever pitch as to sometimes seem threatening, numbing, even agonizing.
night cereal choices
Late-night television is like the cereal aisle in the supermarket: too many choices. Also, too many 'different' brands that really aren't different at all.
reality sugar credit
Like sugar and, oh - let's say the most tabloidy and gossipy reality television programs - credit is, for millions, genuinely addictive.
kids talking adults
Technically, 'Kukla, Fran and Ollie' was a kids' show, but adults watched almost religiously - and we're talking adult adults, celebrated adults - including James Thurber, Orson Welles, John Steinbeck, Adlai E. Stevenson and lyricist Stephen Sondheim.
dozen selling pops
If the networks can get audiences to tolerate pop-up promos by the dozens, maybe they'll start selling pop-up commercials, too.
home cities people
Gimmicks come and go; the cop show seems one genre that will never leave - not as long as people like to sit at home in the suburbs and see what awful things go on in the cities.
fate lasts interviews
By a twist of fate rather than anything approaching journalistic enterprise, I did the last major interview with Johnny Carson.
party guy caught
Jimmy Kimmel still comes across like a guy who crashed a party and got caught at it, yet adamantly refuses to leave.
ducks daffy-duck attention
A fellow with the inventiveness of Albert Einstein but with the attention span of Daffy Duck.
cares critics diminished dropped good maybe nobody staff
In city after city, newspaper after newspaper has diminished its staff of critics, sometimes to zero. Film and T.V. critics have been dropped and not replaced. Maybe they're deemed unnecessary because nobody cares if anything's good or not.