Quotes by Tom Shales

About Tom Shales:

Thomas William "Tom" Shales is an American critic of television programming and operations. He is best known as TV critic for The Washington Post; in 1988, Shales received the Pulitzer Prize. He also writes a column for the television news trade publication NewsPro, published by Crain Communications.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

The perils of credit and debt, especially perilous in the computer age, have long been acknowledged in pop culture, but very infrequently by TV.

Tom Shales

'Leave It to Beaver,' which ran from 1957 until 1963, was one of the strangest, sweetest, most distinctive domestic sitcoms of television's celebrated Golden Age.

Tom Shales

People of a certain age look back on the Mayberry of 'The Andy Griffith Show' and become almost as homesick for that simple fictional hamlet as they do for their own home towns.

Tom Shales

Jerry Seinfeld is amazing in many ways, not the least of them his ability to find humor, and convincing us to find it, too, in the million-and-two details about modern life that under different circumstances might send us into paroxysms of rage.

Tom Shales

In the best traditions of American comedy, from its beginnings through the crash-bang comedies of the 1990s and 2000s, Leslie Nielsen skewered the otherwise proper, did it with mischievous delight and convulsed audiences mercilessly.

Tom Shales

Why, on my mother's birthday, am I thinking about 'Father Knows Best?' At our house, mother knew best at least as often as father did, but then the title of the old sitcom, a homogenized portrait of American family life, was meant to be slightly sard...

Tom Shales

Robert Osborne either has the best job in the world, or comes very close. As millions of viewers know, Osborne is the resident host of the great Turner Classic Movies (TCM) channel, the most reliable source of pure enchantment in the cable universe.

Tom Shales

A fellow with the inventiveness of Albert Einstein but with the attention span of Daffy Duck.

Tom Shales

Maybe it's the hair. Maybe it's the teeth. Maybe it's the intellect. No, it's the hair.

Tom Shales

Late-night television is like the cereal aisle in the supermarket: too many choices. Also, too many 'different' brands that really aren't different at all.

Tom Shales

Perhaps unscripted reality shows and written fiction have already blurred together into some new amalgamated mush, just as the line between commercials and programs has been trashed.

Tom Shales

The once inviolate frame within which programs or commercials were displayed on television - always separately - has been violated to a pulp. Program content is seen increasingly as a mere backdrop on which ads are posted like billboards on a fence.

Tom Shales

You don't hear TV cops griping because they have to enforce some Draconian law that shouldn't be on the books in the first place, or lamenting vindictive excesses in sentencing. Hollywood, supposedly a frothing cauldron of liberalism, has always been...

Tom Shales

Crime dramas will never go away as long as people turn to television for, among other things, reassurance and comfort.

Tom Shales

Like sugar and, oh - let's say the most tabloidy and gossipy reality television programs - credit is, for millions, genuinely addictive.

Tom Shales

Television's escapist programming naturally continues to endorse living beyond one's means as the time-tested American Way and rarely depicts families or individuals wracked by the pressures and miseries that come with excess.

Tom Shales

Larry King's show got to be an increasingly lonely outpost of humane civility in a mephitic menagerie of hotheads, saber rattlers, cretins and crackpots.

Tom Shales

Maybe Larry Kings cannot thrive or even survive in a world where the norms for discourse are rage, vehemence and character assassination. King wanted to be liked, not feared; admired, not loathed.

Tom Shales

Your humble critic confesses that he has been wrestling with 'weight issues' since leaving college lo these, uh, several years ago, so it's hard to be receptive to the moralistic scolding and patronizing encouragement offered endlessly by the alleged...

Tom Shales

The original and very basic 'Law & Order' series has always seemed to me to be 100-percent exposition, with no filler, no pesky nuances and almost no background about the series' continuing characters - just the hard nuts and bolts of pure storytelli...

Tom Shales

Author Bio

  • NameTom Shales
  • DescriptionAmerican critic of television programming and operations
  • BornNovember 3, 1944
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionJournalist