Press: Terrible Tom, the TV Tiger

The Post's Shales needles the networks and delights readers

He has been called brilliant, thoughtful, incisive and screamingly funny. Also, vicious, infuriating, cruel and unfair. NBC President Fred Silverman no longer returns his calls. His thrice-weekly Washington Post TV column, "On the Air," syndicated in 59 other newspapers, causes teeth-gnashing in Hollywood and heartburn in Manhattan's network headquarters. Critic Tom Shales, 33, the plump, droll, sometimes zany man at the heart of all this Sturm und Drang, puts his brown-and-tan saddle shoes up on the desk in his cramped fifth-floor office at the...

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