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
In city after city, newspaper after newspaper has diminished its staff of critics, sometimes to zero. Film and T.V. critics have been dropped and not replaced. Maybe they’re deemed unnecessary because nobody cares if anything’s good or not. – Tom Shales
You know you’re getting older when – well, first off, when you read almost any story that begins ‘You know you’re getting older when.’ But you also know it when you not only never heard of the musical guest on a given ‘Saturday Night Live’ but never heard of the host, either. – 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
Larry David’s armor is his dissatisfaction with the world down to the smallest detail, and up to the whole ghastly arrangement. He won’t win, but he’ll enjoy losing. – 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 allegedly well-meaning. – 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
Crime dramas will never go away as long as people turn to television for, among other things, reassurance and comfort. – 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
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
‘American Idol’ is sometimes lumped with reality shows and it has that element – folks-next-door battling it out in a contest. But instead of fighting leeches, bugs, parasites and each other, as on CBS’s ‘Survivor’ and other shows that imitate it, the ‘American Idol’ contestants, of course, sing. – 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 sardonic. – Tom Shales
A fellow with the inventiveness of Albert Einstein but with the attention span of Daffy Duck. – 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
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 conservative on crime. – 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
Tom Snyder was big enough to fill the night with talk and his own persona. The Snyder we saw on TV was not a replica of the real guy; it was the real guy. – 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
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
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
Tom Snyder was born to broadcast. He loved television and it loved him back. In that, he was a member of a vanishing breed, especially as narrowcasting displaces broadcasting, ‘online’ replaces ‘on the air,’ and any Tom, Dick or Mary can be monarch of a desktop domain, uplinking themselves to satellites in space. – Tom Shales
Perhaps Western civilization is in a post-decline phase, or maybe the decline is just taking a really long time, like the Roman Empire’s did. The Romans had gladiators and Christian-hungry lions and that sort of thing. We have MTV. – Tom Shales
Gimmicks come and go; the cop show seems one genre that will never leave – not as long as people like to sit at home in the suburbs and see what awful things go on in the cities. – Tom Shales
ABC’s intelligently hilarious sitcom ‘Modern Family’ depicts a gay-male marriage in which both partners are refreshingly dimensional, believable human beings. The writers dare to make them flawed and thus fully delineated, but they’re not flawed in the silly, stereotypical ways that once dominated such portrayals. – Tom Shales
