FAREWELL SPECIAL

Pulitzer Prize-Winning TV Critic Tom Shales Dies at Age 79

In more than 40 years reviewing television, he never pulled his punches.

Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic Tom Shales died on Saturday in Fairfax County, Virginia. According to his caretaker Victor Herfurth, Shales died after experiencing complications from COVID-19 and renal failure. He was 79.

In 1977, Shales became The Washington Post’s chief television critic, and in 1988 won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism, making him the fourth tv reviewer to win the award. His columns never pulled their punches, but Shales didn’t concern himself with the ire they’d attract from whiny television executives. “People who respect TV are the ones I respect,” he said. “It’s the ones who wipe their feet on it whom I probably write nasty things about.”

The former president of CBS News Bill Leonard once told Time magazine that Shales used “the English language like a sword to punch holes in whatever he feels like punching holes in.”

Shales took a buyout from the Post in 2006, but remained on contract for another four years.

In 2014, Shales began chronicling what he would go on to call “the end of the talk-show era” for The Daily Beast, which began a piece about the eternal return-over of late night television hosts, for whom Shales’ nostalgic lens was able to impart a great deal of admiration.

BITTERSWEET

The Art of the Sign-Off

Tom Shales

Similarly, Shales also wrote a few odes to David Letterman following his departure from The Late Show. He found Letterman’s performance idiosyncratic and impossible to replicate.

In 2017, Shales wrote about the passing of actor and comedian Robin Williams, and his unwavering commitment and love for making people laugh. “[Williams] did that for 40 years, and yet there was still a meteoric quality to his career—meteoric not for its speed but for its having been a rare cosmic event. The kind, indeed, that you never forget.”

Shales, who worked at The Washington Post for 40 years, has left behind a legacy of incisive and witty writing as he chronicled an era of American television.

King of Comedy

The Creation of Robin Williams

Tom Shales