Tom Shales Quotes

24 quotes in 491 categories

• "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,…
• In the realm of pop celebrity, the bar has been lowered so far that there is no bar. People can be famous for being famous,…
• 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…
• 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…
• The perils of credit and debt, especially perilous in the computer age, have long been acknowledged in pop culture, but very infrequently by TV.
• 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,…
• 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…
• The once inviolate frame within which programs or commercials were displayed on television - always separately - has been violated to a pulp. Program content…
• A fellow with the inventiveness of Albert Einstein but with the attention span of Daffy Duck.
• Jimmy Kimmel still comes across like a guy who crashed a party and got caught at it, yet adamantly refuses to leave.
• 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,…
• In the 500-channel universe, which may, of course, contain many more channels than 500, the fun never stops - fun at such a fever pitch…
• 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…
• Gimmicks come and go; the cop show seems one genre that will never leave - not as long as people like to sit at home…
• Crime dramas will never go away as long as people turn to television for, among other things, reassurance and comfort.
• By a twist of fate rather than anything approaching journalistic enterprise, I did the last major interview with Johnny Carson.
• 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…
• It might be hard to remember this far back, but once upon a time, some of us hoped that public TV would develop into a…
• So it is that one side effect of the HD revolution has been the gratifying and edifying return of the nature documentary - films about…
• Robert Osborne either has the best job in the world, or comes very close. As millions of viewers know, Osborne is the resident host of…

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