Tom Shales; won Pulitzer as television critic, 79
Tom Shales, a Pulitzer Prizewinning television critic for The Washington Post who brought incisive and barbed wit to coverage of the small screen and chronicled the medium as an increasingly powerful cultural force, for better and worse, died Jan. 13 at a hospital in Fairfax County, Va. He was 79.
The cause was complications from COVID and renal failure, said his caretaker, Victor Herfurth.
TV critics in New York and Los Angeles traditionally had greater show business clout than one in the entertainment backwater of Washington, but Mr. Shales proved a formidable exception for more than three decades.
As the Post’s chief TV critic starting in 1977, he worked at a newspaper still basking in the cachet of its Watergate glory, his column was widely syndicated, and his stiletto-sharp commentary on TV stars, trends, and network executives brought him national attention and influence.
Mr. Shales provided exhaustive coverage of all forms of the medium, from nature documentaries to late-night talk shows, network sitcoms to cable dramas, "Saturday Night Live" to pomp-filled State of the Union speeches, perky morning programs to "reality" shows he called "Humiliation Television."
His body of work elevated the coverage and criticism of television beyond mere musing on plots and gags. He described shows, serious or silly, as pieces of a cultural mosaic worthy of deeper inspection.
In 1988, he won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism — becoming the fourth TV reviewer to earn the top prize in journalism — for work that not only evaluated shows on their escapist and artistic merits, but also illuminated how broadcast coverage can shape the public perception of news events.
He had been at the forefront of analyzing political debates as a form of prime-time TV spectacle. He excavated "not only their political meaning but also their media meaning," said Ron Simon, curator of television and radio at the Paley Center for Media in New York. "He understood the sweeping cultural changes. He ran the gamut in trying to understand how TV impacts every aspect of our life."
Unlike the first generation of TV critics, for whom theater and movies served as reference points of quality, Mr. Shales grew up with the medium. He recalled being mesmerized from a young age, watching “I Love Lucy,” “Playhouse 90, and “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” on his family’s 14-inch RCA television set, housed in a mahogany console.
Mr. Shales became a professional critic at a moment when cable was in its infancy. The networks, which still held sway, were generally moving back to a more predictable diet of sitcoms and cop dramas after TV's leap into social commentary with shows such as "All in the Family." Mr. Shales, however, was among those who recognized the shift that had begun.
Television’s potential — and its influence on the national zeitgeist — had been unleashed, he said. He treated the medium accordingly, with a highly entertaining style that could blend the snark of a stand-up comic with the connect-the-dots loftiness of a media scholar.
In one column from 1981, he lambasted the “bonzo journalism” of network TV’s craze for ambush-style investigative reporting: “Naturally one is reminded of the old story about the dog chasing cars — what do they do if they catch one? Wrestle him to the ground? Drag him off to the hoosegow?”
When star CBS News correspondent Dan Rather traveled to war-torn Afghanistan for “60 Minutes” in 1980, Mr. Shales memorably dubbed him “Gunga Dan.” Rather’s conspicuous donning of a men’s cap called a pakol and robes “made him look like an extra out of ‘Dr. Zhivago,’” Mr. Shales declared.
He routinely lampooned ABC’s “Good Morning America” host David Hartman as “Mr. Potato Head” and NBC News’s workaholic Tom Brokaw as “Duncan the Wonder Horse,” popularizing unflattering nicknames bestowed by others.
His columns drew the ire of network executives, who Mr. Shales said often felt above any form of criticism and held those who made a living at it in contempt.
CBS News president Bill Leonard told Time magazine that Mr. Shales “uses the English language like a sword to punch holes in whatever he feels like punching holes in.” Roone Arledge, who was president of ABC News and who Mr. Shales dismissed as “Rooney Tunes,” remarked that the critic “loves to make catchy little phrases that are belittling.”
Mr. Shales responded that he was just throwing back at the bosses the kind of scorn that networks seemed to have for audiences. “People who respect TV are the ones I respect,” he added. “It’s the ones who wipe their feet on it whom I probably write nasty things about.”
But producers such as Grant Tinker (“The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Hill Street Blues”) stood up for 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, for the most part, a model of civility in a medium that often seems populated largely by louts.”
Mr. Shales pretended, with a playful wink, that he was restrained in his harshest reviews.
“No one believes this when I tell them, but after writing a column that’s been particularly mean to one poor helpless fabulously overpaid filthy-rich celebrity or another, I always ask editors if I’ve been ‘too mean’ and if 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 along the lines of, ‘No, it’s not too mean. If anything, it’s not mean enough.’ I have almost always been encouraged to be meaner. See, it’s really all the fault of editors.”
Thomas William Shales was born in Elgin, Ill., about 40 miles west of Chicago, on Nov. 3, 1944. His father operated a towing service and body shop, and he became part-time mayor in the 1960s. His mother was a clothing store manager.
Mr. Shales took a buyout from The Post in 2006 and remained on contract for another four years before being, in his view, unceremoniously edged out because of a salary of about $400,000 per year.
In addition to his work for The Post, he wrote for TelevisionWeek, Huffington Post (now the HuffPost), and Roger Ebert’s website about film and television. 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 deep well of industry sources, Mr. Shales did not consider the newsroom a welcoming place and mostly kept a social distance from colleagues. He once described himself as an M&Ms addict, and he struggled with his weight for much of his life. He never married and had no immediate survivors.