In a lifetime around journalism, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a writer with keener insight or greater virtuosity. A long line of editors nervously eyed clocks as Shales busted a lifetime of deadlines assessing presidential speeches, Academy Awards ceremonies, congressional hearings and other gatherings around the national hearth, only to have a letter-perfect tour de force arrive in the nick of time. His work, said one such editor, John Pancake, “always seemed like magic to me.”
His power lay in his uncanny ability to engage his subject as Everyman, an ordinary American in the thrall of TV, while simultaneously deploying an encyclopedic knowledge and a piercing critical eye. Shales was neither highbrow nor lowbrow. Instead, he vigorously enforced the principle that television owed its viewers a modicum of respect. The industry demanded our attention; in return, he demanded a little creativity, an occasional delight, a dollop of effort. He understood that TV was a mass medium, not an art gallery, but he insisted that “mass” did not have to mean shoddy.
That alone did not explain his success, however, which included the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and co-authorship of two best-selling TV histories. The Everyman who held television to account also explained the audience to itself. He named our shared feelings. Writing on the day in 1986 when the Space Shuttle Challenger blew up on-screen, Shales observed: “On a day like this, America is a small town, a community of grief, and it rallies around television to give it not only news but hope.” As a politics reporter, I was never entirely sure how a major speech or news conference had gone until I read Tom’s reaction. He was a one-man focus group, a national soul.
And he was good, clean fun. (A Midwesterner in the 1950s, Shales fought a long and losing battle against smutty scenes and foul language on TV.) When news anchor Dan Rather donned Afghan garb to report on the mujahideen, Shales cut him to size with just two words: “Gunga Dan.” For years, the highlight of the holiday season was the annual Shales evisceration of Kathie Lee Gifford’s Christmas specials — “a sickeningly saccharine vanity production that should really have been titled ‘O Come, Let Us Adore Me,’” he wrote of the 1995 version.
The distance between the voice on the page and the man himself was oceanic. The critic was fearless, emphatic, savage and hilarious. In person, Tom was bashful, insecure, self-pitying and — if caught unaware — tender. His spry, vigorous prose gave no hint of the gloom that dogged him like Eeyore. Unusually well-paid for a newspaperman, Shales was always broke, or so he would say from behind the wheel of his latest Mercedes. His readers were laughing, while he was a man of constant sorrow.
He surprised himself by living as long as he did. When I met Tom nearly 30 years ago, he warned me not to make firm plans involving him, certainly no long-range plans, on account of the foot he already had in the grave. From then on, we never spoke without Tom foretelling his imminent demise. Like the proverbial stopped clock, eventually he was right.
But it’s not the job of a critic to be right all the time. Every great critic is wrong now and then. As his obituary in The Post astutely noted, Shales panned both “Friends” and “Grey’s Anatomy,” which proved to be colossal and well-loved hits. What a critic must be is sincere. Criticism is ideally an invitation, one human being beckoning others to a shared experience. It is an act of daring and intimacy to say: Here’s what I think and this is what moves me. It is a hand stretched out across a divide.
Sincerity was the bridge that connected the two aspects of Tom Shales. Suits in New York and Hollywood cowered at the prospect of his columns, but deep down, in his insecurity and sentimentality, he was just Tommy from Elgin, Illinois, a shy, often lonely kid entranced by the glowing screen. Shales wrote so powerfully of television and analyzed it so…
Read More: Opinion | Tom Shales, TV critic for the Everyman, demanded respect for viewers