Mike Hale Steps Down as TV Critic After 17 Years on the Beat

Mike Hale is stepping away from television criticism after 17 years on the beat. The critic, long a fixture of the Arts section's coverage of the medium, confirmed his departure with a blunt assessment of how radically the profession has shifted under him.

"The job has changed greatly since I started," Hale said, "because the amount of televised content has exploded."

Hale put the sentence plainly, without nostalgia. It carries the weight of someone who worked the beat through the most disruptive era in the medium's history. When he began reviewing, television criticism meant tracking a finite schedule of broadcast and cable programming — a grid a single critic could reasonably survey. The explosion Hale describes dissolved that grid.

The critic's exit marks the end of a 17-year run spent parsing a medium that kept multiplying faster than any one viewer — or any one reviewer — could absorb. His tenure coincided with the rise of streaming platforms, the collapse of the traditional fall-to-spring season, and a volume of scripted output that turned the critic's central task from selection into triage.

Hale's framing of the change is quantitative, not sentimental. He does not mourn a lost golden age in his remarks; he points to sheer scale. The "explosion" of content is the fact he names as the defining condition of the modern critic's working life.

Seventeen years is a long stretch on any critical beat. In television, those particular 17 years may rank among the most consequential the form has seen, and Hale's departure closes a chapter of coverage that documented the shift in real time.

What his exit means for the shape of TV criticism going forward — whether the role of the individual critic reviewing an entire medium remains viable, or gives way to more specialized coverage — is now an open question his own words frame precisely: the content has exploded; the job has changed greatly.