67 Quotes by Tom Shales

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.