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Tom Shales, the Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic for The Washington Post whose scalpel-sharp dissections of shows he deemed dead on arrival earned him nicknames like the Terror of the Tube, as well as a reputation for the power to make or break shows, died on Saturday in Alexandria, Va. He was 79.<\/p>\n
James Andrew Miller, a longtime collaborator and friend, said he died in a hospice facility from complications of Covid.<\/p>\n
Despite toiling in a political town far removed from the coastal capitals of the entertainment industry, Mr. Shales wielded enormous influence during his three-decade career, starting in 1977, as The Post\u2019s chief television critic.<\/p>\n
Those whose fortunes were tied to the small screen considered him both a kingmaker and a high executioner in an era when network television\u2019s hold on American culture was so tight as to be almost crushing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cHe has been called brilliant, thoughtful, incisive and screamingly funny,\u201d Time magazine observed<\/a> in 1981, christening him \u201cTerrible Tom, the TV Tiger.\u201d \u201cAlso, vicious, infuriating, cruel and unfair. NBC president Fred Silverman no longer returns his calls. His thrice-weekly Washington Post TV column, \u2018On the Air,\u2019 syndicated in 59 other newspapers, causes teeth-gnashing in Hollywood and heartburn in Manhattan\u2019s network headquarters.\u201d<\/p>\n To celebrate Mr. Shales\u2019s 25th anniversary at the newspaper, The Post\u2019s publisher, Katharine Graham, arranged a party at her house that was attended by the likes of Dan Rather, Connie Chung and Conan O\u2019Brien. Ms. Graham explained the star-studded turnout in a single word, according to a report in Washingtonian magazine: \u201cFear.\u201d<\/p>\n No wonder. Delivering prose so colorful it seemed to be written in neon, he had the power to devastate.<\/p>\n In a 1987 review of \u201cThe Morning Program,\u201d CBS\u2019s latest attempt to compete with the \u201cToday\u201d show, he wrote that \u201csome TV shows seem to call less for a review than an exorcism.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWatching it was like waking up and finding the house overrun with last night\u2019s party guests,\u201d he continued, \u201cmost of them stewed to the gills and gabby as all get-out.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In a 2005 column<\/a> about ABC\u2019s \u201cGrey\u2019s Anatomy,\u201d he wrote that it seemed like little more than an assemblage of \u201cscenes from medical shows of the past already restaged ad infinitum and ad nauseam,\u201d and that it was \u201ca \u2018new\u2019 show only in the sense that Dr. Frankenstein\u2019s monster was a new man.\u201d<\/p>\n After he teed off in 2003 on the Fox teenage drama \u201cThe O.C.\u201d as a \u201cmoody, moon-faced trifle,\u201d<\/a> the show fired back with a hospital scene featuring a patient named Tom Shales, who is incontinent. \u201cI consider it an honor,\u201d Mr. Shales said in an interview with the Page Six gossip section of The New York Post. \u201cIt\u2019s a TV critic\u2019s only shot at immortality.\u201d<\/p>\n He was a magnet for furious phone calls from sitcom stars and network titans. \u201c<\/em>So-and-so would call, and he\u2019d tell me, \u2018Get on the other line, this is going to be good,\u2019\u201d Mr. Miller, who worked on the television team at the Post with Mr. Shales in the 1980s, said in a phone interview. \u201cThis person literally would be just cursing him out for 20 minutes, and he\u2019d be sitting there trimming his fingernails. If you hooked him up to an EKG, there would be no movement whatsoever.\u201d<\/p>\n While Mr. Shales\u2019s reviews could be acidic, his indignant salvos came from a place of passion. In a 1989 interview with the public radio host Terry Gross, he recalled his thoughts<\/a> as a child when his family finally got a 14-inch RCA set in a mahogany console: \u201cThis was a miracle, this was the Second Coming and nirvana all rolled into one.\u201d<\/p>\n At 13, he wrote a school paper outlining the steps he planned to take to become a television columnist when he grew up. \u201cHe formed this bond with the medium so early,\u201d Mr. Miller said. \u201cIt was the love of his life.\u201d<\/p>\n When Mr. Shales would do one of his brilliant takedowns, Mr. Miller said, \u201che wasn\u2019t trying to destroy the show or the writers.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cHe was just angry because he knew it could be better. He had no patience for people who were phoning it in or reaching for the lowest common denominator.\u201d<\/p>\n The shows he loved, he loved. In 1990, he called \u201cTwin Peaks,\u201d the director David Lynch\u2019s eerie and unsettling small-town drama, \u201ca captivating blend of the existential and the pulpy, the surreal and the neo-real, the grim and the farcical.\u201d \u201cTwin Peaks,\u201d he added, \u201cis new age music<\/a> for the eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n In a 2006 column<\/a>, he wrote that David Simon\u2019s gritty HBO crime drama \u201cThe Wire\u201d \u201cmight be the most authentic epic ever seen on television.\u201d \u201cYou go to \u2018The Wire\u2019 not to escape,\u201d he added, \u201cbut to be immersed in a world where madness and sanity can seem interchangeable.\u201d<\/p>\n As Mr. Shales told Time: \u201cPeople who respect TV are the ones I respect. It\u2019s the ones who wipe their feet on it whom I probably write nasty things about.\u201d<\/p>\n Thomas William Shales was born on Nov. 3, 1944, in Elgin, Ill., one of three children of Clyde Shales, who ran a towing service and body shop, and Hulda (Reko) Shales, who managed a clothing store.<\/p>\n He served as co-editor of his high school newspaper and went on to become the editor in chief of the campus newspaper at American University in Washington, where he graduated with a degree in journalism in 1968.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n His first full-time job in journalism was at The D.C. Examiner, a free tabloid, where his verbal gymnastics caught the attention of editors at The Post, who hired him in 1972 as a general-assignment reporter. Focusing his sights on television and popular culture, he became the chief TV critic five years later.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The job landed him in the middle of swirling controversies about the toxic state of television, with its blood-soaked detective dramas, sensationalized news shows and sex-addled sitcoms \u2014 which, in the view of many pundits, were a source of cultural rot.<\/p>\n Mr. Shales was all too happy to wade in up to his thighs. In response to a spate of leering television movies at the dawn of the 1980s involving torture, child molestation and teenage prostitution, he wrote that \u201cwatching prime-time TV is like being trapped in Sleaze City\u2019s tackiest honky-tonk.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOne gets a warped and depressing view,\u201d he added, \u201cof what it means to be alive.\u201d<\/p>\n