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Mike Hale has seen a lot of change in his years watching, and writing about, television: the rise of prestige TV (“The Sopranos”! “Breaking Bad”!), the golden age of high-end fantasy (“Game of Thrones”), the triumph of streaming (“Stranger Things”).
“TV is always changing — the kinds of content people make, the kinds of messages they’re trying to get across, the kinds of emotions they’re trying to evoke,” said Mr. Hale, a TV critic at The New York Times for 17 years.
After starting at the paper as a copy editor on the Sports desk in 1995 and serving as a TV editor before becoming a critic in 2009, Mr. Hale retired at the end of last week.
He leaves behind several thousand reviews and a reputation for being thoughtful yet brutally honest. (“The Simpsons”? Hard yes. “Big Little Lies?” “A compendium of clichés about upper-middle-class angst,” he wrote.)
In an interview, he reflected on how TV has changed, his personal favorite shows and what trend might be coming next. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
How did you get started as a critic?
I loved reading criticism, starting with my discovery of Pauline Kael in The New Yorker back in the 1970s. I was the entertainment editor at my college newspaper, and I reviewed movies, theater, books, music, pop music, restaurants — everything except TV, which no one was watching in college in those days.
When I came to The Times, I was hired as an editor, but I wrote on the side. And when drama on cable TV first started to expand, there was suddenly a lot more that needed to be reviewed. I started writing freelance reviews on top of my full-time editing job, and it got to the point where I was writing several reviews a week.
How have you grown as a critic?
You develop greater efficiency. You learn how to deal in a particular way with publicists, TV networks and streamers. The job has changed greatly since I started, because the amount of televised content has exploded. The ways in which we get it have also changed drastically. The amount of attention people pay to TV criticism and their devotion to particular shows have increased hugely.
How has streaming changed the culture around TV, or the shows themselves?
It’s a completely different world. The sophistication, in a certain sense, has increased. The maturity with which shows can address themes and present their content has moved toward more of a model of what you see in a movie theater. That happened in premium cable first, and then in streaming, and now it’s come full circle to where the traditional broadcast networks are able to do some of those things, too.
I wouldn’t say that the best shows now are better than the best shows 30 years ago, though. There were always great things on TV, but not as many of them in the past. Perhaps it was harder to get them made and on the air, but they were there. Looking at the 100 Best TV Shows of the 21st Century list that we recently compiled, some of the shows from the beginning of the century, like “Friday Night Lights,” are as good as anything that’s been done for streaming.
What makes a good TV show?
The same things that make any good work of art: emotion, storytelling, great performances. The key is the performers, as much as, if not more, than the writing or the production values. This sudden elevation of TV in people’s minds as an art form during the streaming era has put a huge focus on writing and showrunners. If there’s anything I’ve tried to do in 17 years, it’s to keep the focus on the actors.
What are your personal favorite TV shows?
Some of the shows that I put in my top 10 of the century are very popular: “30 Rock,” “The Americans,” “Friday Night Lights,” “Homeland.” And then I had some shows that aren’t as well known, but that I thought were as worthy, if not more so: a British political thriller from the 2000s called “State of Play”; a French spy thriller called “The Bureau.” I was very happy to see that made the list, at No. 54.
What’s your comfort watch?
I’ve seen every episode of “NCIS.”
How do you watch the shows you’re reviewing — on an actual television? Your laptop? Your — gasp! — phone?
Most of the screeners we get — advance episodes provided for critics — are online only. For the most part, we’re limited to watching on a laptop or monitor. I never cast something from my laptop to a TV screen because the loss in quality is just too much. So I’m mostly sitting on the couch, watching on my laptop.
How do you think your watching habits will change now that you don’t have to write reviews?
I’m actually looking forward to spending a lot more time reading books, watching movies and going out to see art. Those are all things I’ve done much less than I would have liked to in the last 17 years.
What do you think the next big shift in how we consume TV might be?
Streamers, cable networks and even broadcast networks are all looking around and saying, “What are people watching?” And they’re deciding they need to move into content that’s more like what’s on YouTube, something you would watch on your phone. What’s hot right now is short-form vertical dramas. I think we’ll see a proliferation of that kind of content, which I won’t have much interest in watching.
What is your solution to the crisis of low-lit shows that I can’t see even when I turn my brightness all the way up?
I suffer along with you. Sometimes I find myself going into the bathroom and closing the door, so there’s as little light as possible in the room.
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