Tom Shales, a Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic for The Washington Post, died January 13 in Fairfax County, Virginia. He was 79. The cause was complications from COVID-19 and renal failure.
Shales was among the most influential voices in the history of television critique. He won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1988, the fourth TV critic to win that award.
Shales was born in Elgin, Illinois in, 1944. He was co-editor at his high school newspaper, and worked at the time in radio, as a disc jockey, writer and announcer. He attended Elgin Community College before transferring to American University, where he edited the college newspaper and wrote film reviews.
After graduating in 1968 with a bachelor’s degree in journalism, Shales became entertainment editor of the free D.C. Examiner. He joined the Post as a general assignment reporter in the Style section in 1972.
He took over as chief TV critic at the Post in 1977, emerging as a voice that those in television could not wait to read, and often dreaded doing so.
According to the Post, “His body of work elevated the coverage and criticism of television beyond mere musing on plots and gags. He described shows, serious or silly, as pieces of a cultural mosaic worthy of deeper inspection.”
Shales also wrote for Television Week, The Huffington Post and RogerEbert.com. His books include Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live (2002) and Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN (2011), both oral histories written with James Andrew Miller.
Shales took a buyout from the Post in 2006 and was on contract at the paper for four subsequent years.
Whether his reviews were glowing or brutal, Shales’s love of the medium was always evident in his work. “People who respect TV are the ones I respect,” he told the Post. “It’s the ones who wipe their feet on it whom I probably write nasty things about.”
