RIP: Tom Shales, Pulitzer-winning TV critic of fine-tuned wit, dies at 79.
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.
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“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.”
With some limits: Tom Shales: I’m Shocked To Be Told I Minimized Roman Polanski’s Crime. Here, Let Me Do It Again! “In Hollywood I am not sure a 13-year-old is really a 13-year-old.”
Related: Shales and his NPR interviewer try to make sense of a new movie called Star Wars, this strange new “complete science fiction fantasy with absolutely no redeeming moral values or moralistic values either” that’s “taking the country by proverbial storm.” Are the special effects any good?, Shales is asked at one point. “Gee, it’s kind of hard to describe the whole universe blowing up in your face.”