Name: Tom Shales on Later (1991) and Late Late Show (1997)
Uploaded: 2024-01-14T20:25:37.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Tom Shales on Later (1991) and Late Late Show (1997)' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-01-14. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Tom Shales on Later (1991) and Late Late Show (1997)' from Don Giller on Comedy Buff. Published 2024-01-14. Transcript available.

Tom Shales on Later (1991) and Late Late Show (1997)

Thanks for staying up later.
With us tonight is Tom Shales,
arguably the most respected television critic in the country.
He's written for the Washington Post for many years.
His columns are syndicated in over 200 newspapers,
and a few years ago he received the Pulitzer Prize for criticism.
What's the, uh, you're wincing at this list of your credentials.
I think I better go now.
All right, thank you for stopping by.
What's the proper function of a television critic?
To suffer, to suffer as few have suffered.
Well, uh, you know, there are 240 million television critics in this country.
Why should anyone listen to me? I don't know.
You have to, you have to love the medium that you're right about.
You have to look for things that other people might not see.
And sometimes you succeed, and, um, that's about it.
And you pick up your paycheck every Tuesday and go home.
Isn't an essential ingredient, though, at least from your perspective,
that you like television?
You don't like everything on television,
but you're not, as a starting point, cynical about the medium itself,
as so many critics seem to be.
No, I say, you know, I better love it.
I married it.
I'd be very unhappy otherwise.
And it is true.
I mean, if a drama critic hated every play,
people would say, you know, get some new drama critic.
But a lot of TV critics can pretty well get by hating every TV show.
I guess it's because everyone likes to feel superior to TV.
You know, it's the little box in the corner.
It's not something you pay to go and see at the,
at the Gershwin Theater or whatever.
So we all like to look down on it.
It's the national kick-me toy, among all its other functions.
I don't remember firsthand the very earliest days of television,
but I think I remember a lot of TV from the late 50s to early 60s on.
The late 50s.
In my opinion, there's more good stuff on television now in total,
in raw numbers, than there has ever been.
The proportion is low, but with all the choices available
on cable television and the various outlets,
and with a number of good shows on network television,
if you made up a roster, the lousy stuff would far outweigh the good stuff.
But if you're selective, you could derive a lot of quality entertainment
and information from television.
Yes, but who wants to bother with that?
No, you're right.
You're right.
And look at the books that are published in this country every year.
Hundreds and hundreds of books, you know.
How to Stuff a Cat and all this crap.
Funny cartoon books and things people go bloop, bloop, bloop,
and then throw us out.
And no one ever goes, oh, the book industry is killing us.
It's polluting our culture and all this and that.
There's probably no less good TV than there are good books,
proportionately speaking.
And yet television kind of, here I am defending television.
That's not what I'm supposed to be doing, I guess.
But people do generalize about TV.
Now, the thing that was there in the 50s that you're too young to remember,
perhaps,
and I love saying that to people.
It's the only thing about getting old that I like,
is that there was an excitement about it.
There was that electricity, not just the kind that comes through the wall.
When it was a live play, 9 o'clock from New York,
somehow, sitting in, you know, my little house in the Midwest,
I felt some of that excitement that those people in New York must have been
feeling
as the clock went doot, doot, doot, you know.
And it was, you know, ready, set, go.
And there was no turning back at that point.
That sort of point of no return dangerousness that there was to TV then,
even if it wasn't that good.
You know, one critic looked at some old play, Requiem for a Heavyweight,
and said, oh, you could see the mic boom in one of the shots,
and it wasn't that good.
But that's missing the point completely.
It was a creative excitement that was probably never going to be able to be
recaptured.
Certainly, you don't get it much from access cable, you know,
which I guess is about the closest thing now.
Do you enjoy some of that stuff, though?
Flipping around.
See, in my opinion, as long as I could watch sports and news,
if I could also see the Love Connection, Soul Train,
and just flip around access cable, I'd get pretty much what I needed from TV.
It's wonderful.
Flipping around is the new American way of life, you know.
I think the remote control clicker is at least as significant as the satellite
or any of these other big tech, not VCR, any of that,
because that's, it's called grazing, and we all do it now.
And I've fallen in love with a little lady who makes,
now don't read too much into this, snacks on the Snack Master.
Have you seen her?
Uh-uh.
She just sits for half an hour.
She's turning out corn dogs.
She's turning out muffins.
She's turning out all this stuff.
And then the guy comes on and says, order one.
And I always think, well, I would order one if she came with it.
Now all you do is just pour the batter right into the center of the wells,
just as if you were filling muffin pans.
And if you want to get a little creative,
sometimes I put a little crushed pineapple in that.
It makes like a Hawaiian cornbread.
Sometimes I dice some jalapenos in there, make Mexican cornbread.
Or if I've got a lot of little kids around that I'm feeding,
I'll push a half of a wiener or a hot dog right down in the center of each well,
and that's going to give me little corn dogs in only four minutes.
And remember, these are corn dogs.
So when the kids bite into them, they're going to find a hot dog hidden inside.
You know, now this is a serious issue because these are called program-length
commercials.
And in a newspaper like the Washington Post,
if we run an ad that's designed to look like a newspaper story,
then at the top and the bottom it says,
advertisement, advertisement, advertisement, over and over.
But for 30 minutes on cable especially,
and on UHF stations and some smaller independents,
you see these things.
And it doesn't say commercial on the screen all the time,
which I think it should.
A couple of nights ago, I'm flipping around,
and there was an old Lawrence Welk, as if that isn't redundant.
There was a Lawrence Welk, it was in color,
so it must have been from like 1970,
and it was on some cable station.
And I said to myself, this is a good thing,
because just like a college basketball game
between Pepperdine and Texas El Paso
appeals to some sliver of an audience,
there's some lady who's 75 years old,
you know, somebody's maiden aunt,
who can't get Lawrence Welk anymore,
and that's part of the beauty of cable.
It's there for her.
Am I too optimistic and cheerful a man?
No, but I like the image of you sitting before the TV set going,
this is good.
This is good.
I've decreed that it's Lawrence Welk.
This is good.
Yeah, well, no, you're right, you're right.
There are more choices,
and it's just that we all thought more television
would mean better television.
It didn't.
It meant more of the same, really.
But, okay, just more diversity is good.
I would go along with that.
What's worthwhile?
On TV.
Present show accepted, I suppose?
Well, you know, in spite of everything,
I still find Twin Peaks to be basically worthwhile.
It's kind of gone haywire from its original haywire.
You know, it's compounded its haywire-ness
into where it's become almost too silly.
And yet there's something that keeps me watching it.
It's that corner it might turn in the next few seconds, you know,
or that little moment of, you know, lyric beauty that they may have,
that unexpected poetic moment next to the ridiculous farcical moment.
Well, that's like a lot of Lynch's stuff, movie or television.
Yeah.
And normally I hate serials.
I hate anything that you have to watch every week,
because I think it's a big, you know, presumption on your time.
But this I like.
And I love The Letterman Show.
Yeah.
The Letterman Show, to me, is a real beacon of, like,
therapeutic insanity at the end of the day.
It's just, or the beginning of the day,
if you tape it and watch it later, as a lot of people do.
What portion of the viewing audience do you think just plain doesn't get Letterman?
I guess we can assume that after a while they drop out and they're not regulars.
But people will say to me, you know, he's so sarcastic.
Oh, is that it, I say?
He's so, why is he so sarcastic?
I mean, it's one thing not to think it's funny.
It's another thing not to know that's the idea.
But I think a lot of people just don't know that's the idea.
Well, the people that don't get it watch Arsenio, because that's a show anyone
can get.
I mean, that's aimed right at the middle.
You know, Dave is sarcastic.
You think about life.
You think about all the stupid things that happen every day, especially in New
York.
You pick up the paper and, you know, all this terror and horrible stuff.
Now, what is your response going to be to this?
Are you going to get really sad and very blue, as would be logical?
Or are you going to just make fun of the whole thing and just be sarcastic and
snide about it?
And try to keep your equilibrium that way.
And that's what I think he does.
And he makes me mad, too.
You know, sometimes I think we are watching the deterioration of a human mind
on that show.
I mean, the guy has got more tics and little idiosyncrasies.
And now he's flapping his coat a lot.
I can't stop doing this.
And you begin to feel like you know him personally as you watch this and you're
thinking, you know, the poor man.
But he's doing it for us.
You know, it's like a sacrificial experience he's going through.
How important or maybe essential is it to have grown up with television to be a
fan of Letterman?
Gosh, I think a lot of people who watch Letterman aren't like me where I
remember television arriving.
You know, I remember this thing coming from outer space and landing in the
living room.
But you have to love popular culture, I think, to like Letterman or to get it.
And popular culture is television.
I mean, that's what 99% of popular culture is.
It all has to go through television to become popular culture, I think.
So you're probably right.
You probably have to be a television creature.
But most of us are.
I mean, who isn't?
I don't know that many people that aren't.
A lot of people that work at the newspaper like to claim they don't watch it.
But then they always seem to have seen, you know, last night's episode of
whatever it is, Cheers.
Cheers still hangs in there.
It's amazing, isn't it?
I think they should make it a franchise like Saturday Night Live,
where if, you know, the people on the show now, like Ted Danson,
make so much money that it, you know, could wipe out the national debt, this
guy,
because he's been on the show so long.
So eventually, it's just going to, he's going to leave and new people will come
in.
And maybe you could just keep that bar going, keep that place in operation,
like this room.
Because it is a place that people have come to love.
And it's a family sitcom without that, you know, corny domestic family setting.
You don't have a living room and a kitchen and all that.
But you do have a family.
They're very much a family.
Have you changed your perceptions at all about the three anchormen?
You've always liked Rather.
Even in the face of critical assaults, he's endured from other directions.
You've always liked Rather.
You thought Brokaw was, for lack of another term, callow.
And you once said about Peter Jennings that he should be selling cognac.
Looks like a guy who should be selling cognac but not anchoring the news.
He's got that debonair.
Plus, his head keeps doing this.
I don't know what that is.
Well, but Jennings is very successful now.
And I think it's because he's very conversational with the news.
And people are used to their local news where it's not just conversational.
It's, you know, hi, Freddie, how are you?
And slap on the back.
Overly familiar, I think.
But people get used to that.
So now they like Jennings because he's kind of conversat