Tom Shales, the Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic for The Washington Post whose scalpel dissections of shows he considered dead on arrival earned him nicknames like the Subway Terror, as well as a reputation for the power to make or break shows. He died Saturday in Alexandria, Virginia. He was 79 years old.
James Andrew Miller, a longtime collaborator and friend, said he died in hospice from Covid complications.
Despite working in a political city far removed from the entertainment industry's coastal capitals, Shales wielded enormous influence during his three-decade career, which began in 1977 as The Post's chief television critic.
Those whose fortunes were tied to the small screen considered him both a kingmaker and a great executioner in an era when network television's grip on American culture was so strong it was almost overwhelming.
“He has been called brilliant, thoughtful, incisive and tremendously funny,” Time magazine observed in 1981, dubbing him “Terrible Tom, the Tiger of Television.” “Also, cruel, infuriating, cruel and unfair. NBC president Fred Silverman no longer returns his calls. His thrice-weekly Washington Post television column, 'On the Air,' syndicated in 59 other newspapers, causes teeth-gnashing in Hollywood and heartburn in the network's Manhattan headquarters.”
To celebrate Mr. Shales' 25th anniversary at the newspaper, Post editor Katharine Graham hosted a party at her home attended by the likes of Dan Rather, Connie Chung and Conan O'Brien. Ms. Graham explained the star-studded turnout with a single word, according to a report in Washingtonian magazine: “Fear.”
It is not surprising. With prose so colorful it seemed written in neon, she had the power to devastate.
In a 1987 review of “The Morning Program,” CBS’s last attempt to compete with the “Today” show, he wrote that “some television programs seem to require less a review than an exorcism.”
“Watching it was like waking up to find the house overrun with guests from last night's party,” he continued, “most of them boiled to the gills and chatting as everyone filed out.”
In a 2005 column on ABC's “Grey's Anatomy,” he wrote that it seemed like little more than a set of “scenes from medical shows from the past already restaged ad infinitum and ad nauseum,” and that it was “a 'new' show.” . only in the sense that Dr. Frankenstein's monster was a new man.”
After the 2003 Fox teen drama “The OC” opened as a “moon-faced, moody trifle,” the show responded with a hospital scene featuring an incontinent patient named Tom Shales. “I consider it an honor,” Shales said in an interview with the New York Post's Page Six gossip section. “It's a TV critic's only chance at immortality.”
He was a magnet for angry phone calls from sitcom stars and network titans. “So-and-so would call and say, 'Get on the other line, this is going to be fine,'” Miller, who worked on the Post's television team with Shales in the 1980s, said in a telephone interview. “This person was literally cursing at him for 20 minutes and he was sitting there cutting his nails. “If you hooked it up to an EKG, there would be no movement.”
While Shales' criticism may be acidic, his salvos of outrage come from a place of passion. In a 1989 interview with public radio host Terry Gross, he recalled his thoughts as a child when his family finally got a 14-inch RCA television on a mahogany console: “This was a miracle, it was the Second Coming and nirvana arrived.” . in one.”
At age 13, he wrote a school paper outlining the steps he planned to take to become a television columnist when he grew up. “He formed this bond with the medium very early,” Miller said. “She was the love of his life.”
When Shales was making one of his brilliant takedowns, Miller said, “he wasn't trying to destroy the show or the writers.”
“I was just angry because I knew it could be better. He had no patience with people calling him on the phone or looking for the lowest common denominator.”
The shows I loved, loved. In 1990, he called “Twin Peaks,” director David Lynch’s brooding, haunting small-town drama, “a captivating blend of the existential and the pulpy, the surreal and the neoreal, the grim and the ridiculous.” “Twin Peaks,” she added, “is new age music for the eyes.”
In a 2006 column, he wrote that David Simon's gritty HBO crime drama “The Wire” “might be the truest epic ever seen on television.” “You go to 'The Wire' not to escape,” he added, “but to immerse yourself in a world where madness and sanity can seem interchangeable.”
As Shales told Time: “I respect people who respect television. “I probably write nasty things about those who wipe their feet with it.”
Thomas William Shales was born on November 3, 1944 in Elgin, Illinois, to three children of Clyde Shales, who ran a towing service and body shop, and Hulda (Reko) Shales, who ran a clothing store. .
He served as co-editor of his high school newspaper and later became editor-in-chief of the campus newspaper at American University in Washington, where he graduated with a degree in journalism in 1968.
His first full-time job in journalism was at The DC Examiner, a free tabloid, where his verbal gymnastics caught the attention of The Post editors, who hired him in 1972 as a general assignment reporter. Focusing his sights on television and popular culture, he became television's leading critic five years later.
The job placed him in the middle of controversies over the toxic state of television, with its blood-soaked detective dramas, sensational news shows and sexually themed sitcoms, which many experts believed were a source of rot. cultural.
Mr. Shales was very happy to get in up to his thighs. In response to a spate of salacious television movies in the early 1980s involving torture, child abuse, and teenage prostitution, he wrote that “watching prime-time television is like being trapped in the most vulgar honky ton of Sleaze City.”
“You have a warped and depressing view,” he added, “of what it means to be alive.”
His sharp takes earned him a Pulitzer for criticism in 1988.
While his Post column never lost influence, Shales, who earned more than $300,000 a year from his Post salary and syndication income, accepted a buyout from The Post in 2006 after a management transition. He continued to contribute columns under contract until 2010.
In addition to his columns in the Post, he published several books, including two oral histories with Mr. Miller: “Live From New York,” a story from “Saturday Night Live” (2002) and “Those Guys Have All the Fun.” ”, on ESPN (2011).
Shales, who never married or had children, leaves no immediate survivors.
After spending years in his Washington Post office with three televisions flashing non-stop and with three other televisions blaring at his home in McLean, Virginia, Shales told Time that sometimes even he tuned out from the programming at hand. “After all,” he said, “only about 2 percent of it is really worth seeing.”
