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The Washington Post

Tom Shales, a Pulitzer Prize-winning 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 <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1981/04/26/journalism-by-the-jugular/32e071f6-f85b-4b21-bbab-cd6afd7f74db/" target=_blank>column</a> 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 mocked him in an article headlined <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1980/04/15/theyd-rather-send-dan-60-minutes-of-risk-in-afghanistan/6c6c8f54-27d2-43c2-9b9c-7569c639fc2e/" target=_blank>“Gunga Dan.” </a>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.” <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/12/06/innovative-abc-chairman-roone-arledge-dies-at-71/3af46569-409f-47bc-92f2-a53974f8dae6/" target=_blank>Roone Arledge</a>, 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.”

A recurring target for Mr. Shales was Kathie Lee Gifford, the perma-smile co-host with <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/regis-philbin-boisterous-television-personality-dies-at-88/2020/07/25/8f8f3094-ceac-11ea-b0e3-d55bda07d66a_story.html" target=_blank>Regis Philbin</a> on the syndicated morning show “Live With Regis and Kathie Lee.” He regarded her as like a pebble in his shoe, annoyed by relentless peppiness, boundless self-adoration and cloying sentimentality. Mr. Shales took particular glee in bashing Gifford’s Christmas specials during the 1990s.

“That ghastly Gifford grin, ear to ear and back again, seems steeped in self-esteem and almost blinding in its showbiz phoniness,” he <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1995/12/20/kathie-lee-the-grin-that-stole-christmas/f594b669-d6ba-44e4-a628-71f9dcb3f55d/" target=_blank>wrote</a> in a review of “Kathie Lee: Home for Christmas,” which included her two “mercilessly exploited” children and her husband, retired football great <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/frank-gifford-star-on-the-gridiron-and-in-the-announcers-booth-dies-at-84/2015/08/09/c752c5c8-3f09-11e5-b989-c4297962b4b8_story.html" target=_blank>Frank Gifford</a>. He compared the special to Soviet torture techniques and directed his sympathy toward her offspring.

“Imagine the therapists’ bills those kids will tally up in the years ahead,” he wrote.

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.

In addition to co-editing the high school newspaper, Mr. Shales worked at a local radio outlet 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 graduating in 1968 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism, Mr. Shales became entertainment editor of the short-lived D.C. Examiner, a free tabloid. An editor for The Post’s Style section had taken notice of his drollery in print but did not offer him a job as a general assignment reporter until 1972.

“They told me I didn’t seem impressed enough by the prospect of working at The Post,” he recalled to Washingtonian magazine, “and they certainly weren’t impressed by my educational background. I hadn’t gone to Harvard.”

Although he acquitted himself admirably on non-entertainment pieces in Style, Mr. Shales stood out mostly because of his enthusiasm for — and strong opinions about — popular culture. That quality came to the fore with the film criticism he regularly contributed to NPR throughout the 1970s and for years afterward.

He was an early and staunch advocate of filmmaker George Lucas’s sci-fi adventure “Star Wars” (1977), calling it the “best kids’ movie for adults since ‘The Wizard of Oz.’” Mr. Shales continued the review with an avalanche of wordplay (“unquestionably splendibulous … indubitably fantasmical”) and cultural references to Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels,” Homer’s “Odyssey,” the battle scenes in the wartime propaganda movie “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “Tarzan.”

When Mr. Shales became chief TV critic in 1977, Style editor Shelby Coffey III became his staunchest booster, turning him into a marquee asset. In an interview for this obituary, Coffey recalled Mr. Shales as a marvel to watch on deadline: “Coming in with an hour to spare, writing in a wild burst of energy and turning in his story, clean — always 10 minutes late, on pure principle.”

As the years passed, Mr. Shales profiled TV stars and network honchos and commented on the uptick in gratuitous violence and sexual content. Once asked by a Post reader what he considered quality television, Mr. Shales boiled it down to a matter of artistic honesty, no matter the genre. “I guess just that it succeed on its own terms,” he replied, “that it be true to some apparent purpose, have something unique to say or, I guess, just succeed as pleasantly frivolous escapism.”

As a result, Mr. Shales had effusive praise for programs that defied convention and went beyond lazy tropes. He wrote admiringly of late-night host David Letterman, whom he praised for his ironic irreverence and intolerance of showbiz phonies. HBO’s “The Larry Sanders Show,” he wrote in 1998, was “the best original sitcom in the history of cable TV,” a talk show satire “of show business and the egomania that thrives there like scum on a pond.”

“But the program,” he continued, “has also always been about people and their dreams, about the lengths they go to get them and, of course, about what fools we mortals be — except that it’s HBO so they’d use a much stronger word than ‘fools.’”

Viewer ratings sometimes overruled Mr. Shales’s judgments. He dismissed the hit “Grey’s Anatomy” as a recycling of every medical drama that preceded it and panned the popular sitcom “Friends” as a slick mediocrity.

His withering reviews of the Fox teen soap <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2003/08/05/the-oc-land-of-the-brooding-teen/c7c18c5c-b01c-4d76-9d6d-b808d133ae6c/" target="_blank">“The O.C.”</a> and the Washington-set CBS crime drama <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2000/10/07/cbss-district-a-capital-crime/c88dcd7b-e8b2-4359-a2bb-c2b92cf45504/" target="_blank">“The District”</a> were repaid in unkind by the shows’ writers: In the first, an incontinent hospital patient was named in Mr. Shales’s dishonor; in the second, the main character instructs his puppy to urinate on a review by 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 being trashed by a TV show that you trashed I guess is some sort of an honor.”

“It sounds all very sick to me,” O’Brien quipped.

Mr. Shales’s view of O’Brien had once been dim, calling him a “fidgety marionette [with] dark, beady little eyes like a rabbit” presiding over an “hour of aimless dawdle masquerading as a TV program.”

In time, Mr. Shales came to revise his evaluation of O’Brien, praising his modesty, self-effacement and intelligence, and even <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMM-udgDvMw&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&source_ve_path=Mjg2NjY&feature=emb_logo" target=_blank>consented to appear</a> on his program in 2003, reviewing it in real time and saying that the only low point that evening was the presence of a “tired old television critic.”

Mr. Shales took a buyout from The Post in 2006 and remained on contract for another four years before being, <a href="https://www.washingtonian.com/2010/10/22/the-mystery-of-tom-shales/" target=_blank>in his view</a>, 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&amp;Ms addict, and he struggled with his weight for much 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 hope of finding originality, risk-taking and even beauty in the TV industry was often dashed. But he forged on, as a matter of faith in a medium he fundamentally adored. As he explained in an online Post chat in 2007, “I still have a foolish faith that TV will get better before it gets worse, and then if it gets worse it will get better again.”

A previous version of this article misspelled the title of the show "Live with Regis and Kathie Lee." This article has been corrected. 

Society of Professional Journalists "Dateline Award," first place and finalist for feature writing, 2019

Society of Professional Journalists "Dateline Award," finalist for feature writing, 2017

American Society of Newspaper Editors, finalist for Best Obituary Writing,2005

Society for Features Journalism, second place for feature specialty writing, 2022

University of Virginia, BA

Columbia University, MA

Adam Bernstein has spent his career putting the "post" in The Washington Post, first as an obituary writer and then as editor. The American Society of Newspaper Editors recognized Bernstein’s ability to exhume “the small details and anecdotes that get at the essence of the person.” He joined The Post in 1999. 

Adam Bernstein

Various APME awards 

Wilbur Award for International Religion Reporting, 2007

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Brian Murphy joined The Washington Post after more than 20 years as a foreign correspondent and bureau chief for the Associated Press in Europe and the Middle East. Murphy has reported from more than 50 countries and has written four books.

Brian Murphy

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Tom Shales, Pulitzer-winning TV critic of fine-tuned wit, dies at 79

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