Shales Loves Seinfeld

For many years now, Tom Shales, the Washington Post’s Pulitzer-winning TV critic, has displayed the kind of obsession with “Seinfeld” that Robert De Niro reserved for a teenaged Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver. Each new comedy that’s launched, it seems, provides Shales with an opportunity for another unflattering comparison with his late, lamented love. As he put it earlier this year, “Every time a new sitcom is announced, some of us, giddy with optimism, wonder, ‘Will this be the new “Seinfeld”?'” …

Indeed, it often seems Shales would prefer to be left to his happy memories than to engage with anything that’s actually on the air.