Gene Shalit has died. A humor writer, TV personality, and most especially a film critic, Shalit spent nearly 40 years occupying his Critic’s Corner on NBC’s morning show Today, where he prided himself on blending puns, silly gags, and goofball antics into his more thoughtful analytical work. Iconic (and occasionally mocked) both for his easily imitated appearance—mustache, frizzy hair, and all—as well as his reputation as something of a soft touch in the world of film critique, Shalit was an instantly recognizable cornerstone of TV film criticism from the 1970s through the 2000s. Per Variety, Shalit died on Friday, just three months after his 100th birthday.
Born in New York, Shalit got his start as a press agent, journalist, and columnist, with his work as a writer for Ladies’ Home Journal in the late ’60s reportedly catching the eyes of producers at NBC. (Said eyes apparently did a double take when they found out what Shalit actually looked like; he spent his first few years at NBC in its radio division.) In 1973, though, the company decided to give Shalit a try in front of cameras, starting with book reviews on Today that eventually expanded into the world of film. He would stay on in the position for the better part of the next four decades, outlasting every other host or personality on the network, and becoming a genuine TV institution as a regular part of viewers’ morning routine.
Because despite his work, and skills, as a writer—and his reviews were often aggressively written, with layered punwork and witty nested asides taking the place of more off-the-cuff opinion—Shalit was an inveterate creature of TV. All of those aspects of his persona that were easily mocked by contemporaries—his looks, his occasionally labored joke writing, his willingness to give both crowdpleasers and their stars a pass in both interviews and reviews—were aimed toward his understanding of the TV-based film critic as an entertainer, first and foremost. Watching an old Shalit review on YouTube may not give you the most robust understanding of a film’s themes or its deeper merits or flaws, but it’s almost always fun, a two-minute comedy routine from America’s jocular morning TV uncle. (It’s not for nothing that his only appearance on Today after his retirement in 2010 was a tribute to long-time colleague Willard Scott, who brought a similar understanding of the job to TV weather.)
Outside the Critic’s Corner, Shalit occasionally poked a bit of fun at his own reputation: Like contemporaries Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, he appeared in episodes of The Critic (alongside Jon Lovitz, who played him on multiple occasions on Saturday Night Live), and even briefly appeared in an episode of Spongebob Squarepants as, obviously, “Gene Scallop.” He also occasionally responded to critics of his critiques; notably, after GLAAD took umbrage with Shalit’s 2005 review of Brokeback Mountain—in which he characterized Jake Gyllenhaal’s character as a “sexual predator” for his behavior toward Heath Ledger’s Ennis—Shalit issued an apology, writing, “I certainly had no intention of casting aspersions on anyone in the gay community or on the community itself. I regret any emotional hurt that may have resulted from my review.” (Reporting on the apology at the time, Advocate pointed toward its own archives, where Shalit had once written a column in support of his son Peter, a physician who came out as gay to him in the 1970s.)
Shalit’s family issued a statement today confirming his death, writing that he had “passed away peacefully today after 100 years of an amazing life.”
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