Top Tom Shales Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Tom Shales Biography

Thomas William "Tom" Shales (born November 3, 1944) is an American writer and critic of television programming and operations. He is best known as the television critic for The Washington Post, for which Shales received the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1988. He also writes a column for the television news trade publication NewsPro, published by Crain Communications.

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Tom Shales Quotes

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

Attention, Daffy Duck, Ducks, Fellow, Span

If the networks can get audiences to tolerate pop-up promos by the dozens, maybe they'll start selling pop-up commercials, too.

Commercials, Dozen, Networks, Pops, Selling, Start

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.

Depicts, Endorse, Mean, Pressure, Pressures, Way

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.

Back, Certain, Home, Look, People, Simple

By a twist of fate rather than anything approaching journalistic enterprise, I did the last major interview with Johnny Carson.

Enterprise, Fate, Interview, Journalistic, Lasts, Twists

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.

Cereal, Choices, Different, Night, Television

Jimmy Kimmel still comes across like a guy who crashed a party and got caught at it, yet adamantly refuses to leave.

Across, Caught, Guy, Like, Party

No matter how much programming improves, however, media savants tend to see the medium living out numbered days. It's feared that the Internet will do to TV what TV did to the movies in the 1950s. But instead of panicking, the networks are finding ways to co-opt the Web.

Matter, Media, Movies, Television, Tend, Web

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.

Book, Enforce, Hollywood, Lamenting, Law

Technically, 'Kukla, Fran and Ollie' was a kids' show, but adults watched almost religiously - and we're talking adult adults, celebrated adults - including James Thurber, Orson Welles, John Steinbeck, Adlai E. Stevenson and lyricist Stephen Sondheim.

Adults, Fran, Kids, Religiously, Stephen, Talking

Somewhere around the turn of the century, it stopped being hip to say you never watched TV. Adults are much more likely to find something to engage them on television than they are at the local multiplex. Edges are being cut on television all the time, but at the movies only now and then.

Adults, Cutting, Engage, Stopped, Television, Turn

"More fun than a barrel of monkeys. " Has anyone ever stopped to think how cranky, if not downright vicious, a barrelful of monkeys would be, especially once released from the barrel?

Clever, Cranky, Fun, Funny, Smart, Vicious

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

Age, Computer, Long, Perils, Tvs

Obviously neither 'American Idol' nor 'Dancing With the Stars' is a variety show in the classic sense, but the way they incorporate elements of drama, comedy and suspense is moderately ingenious.

Drama, Idols, Sense, Show, Stars