Frank Rich
Rich in 2004
Born	Frank Hart Rich Jr. (1949-06-02)June 2, 1949 (age 75) Washington, D.C., U.S.
Occupation	Writer television producer
Alma mater	Harvard University (BA)
Period	1971–present
Genre	Non-fiction
Spouse	Gail Winston ​ ​ (m. 1976; div. 1987)​ Alex Witchel ​ (m. 1991)​
Children	Nathaniel Simon

Frank Hart Rich Jr.^[1] (born June 2, 1949) is an American essayist andliberal op-ed columnist,^[2][3] who held various positions withinThe New York Times from 1980 to 2011.^[4] He has also produced television series and documentaries forHBO.

Rich is currently writer-at-large forNew York magazine, where he writes essays on politics and culture and engages in regular dialogues on news of the week for the "Daily Intelligencer".^[5] He served as executive producer of the long-running HBO comedy seriesVeep, having joined the show at its outset in 2011, and of the HBO drama seriesSuccession.

Born on June 2, 1949, Rich grew up inWashington, D.C. His mother, Helene Fisher (née Aaronson), a schoolteacher and artist, was from aRussian Jewish family that originally settled inBrooklyn, New York City, but moved to Washington, D.C., following thestock market crash of 1929. His father, Frank Hart Rich, a businessman, was from aGerman Jewish family long-settled in Washington.^[6][7][8] He attended public schools and graduated fromWoodrow Wilson High School in 1967.^[9]

Rich attendedHarvard College inCambridge, Massachusetts. At Harvard, he was editorial chairman ofThe Harvard Crimson,^[10] the university's daily student newspaper. Rich was an honorary Harvard College scholar and a member ofPhi Beta Kappa, and received a Henry Russell Shaw Traveling Fellowship. He graduatedmagna cum laude in 1971 with aBachelor of Arts degree inAmerican history andliterature.^[4]

Before joiningThe New York Times in 1980, Rich was afilm and television critic forTime, a film critic forThe New York Post, and film critic and senior editor ofNew Times Magazine. In the early 1970s, he was a founding editor of theRichmond (Va.) Mercury.^[4]

Rich served as chief theater critic ofThe New York Times from 1980 to 1993, earning the nickname "Butcher of Broadway" for the perceived power of his negative reviews to close Broadway shows.^[11] He first won attention from theater-goers with an essay forThe Harvard Crimson about theBroadway musicalFollies (1971), byStephen Sondheim, during its pre-Broadwaytryout run inBoston.^[12] In his study of the work, Rich was "the first person to predict the legendary status the show eventually would achieve". The article "fascinated"Harold Prince, the musical's co-director, and "absolutely intrigued" Sondheim, who invited the undergraduate to lunch to further discuss his feelings about the production.^[13]

External videos
Presentation by Rich onHot Seat, September 1, 1998,C-SPAN

In a retrospective article forThe New York Times Magazine, "Exit the Critic," published in 1994, Rich reflected on the controversies during his tenure as drama critic as well as on the playwrights he championed and on the tragedies that decimated the New York theater during the height of the AIDS crisis.^[14] A collection of Rich's theater reviews was published in a book,Hot Seat: Theater Criticism forThe New York Times, 1980–1993 (1998). He also wroteThe Theatre Art of Boris Aronson, with Lisa Aronson, in 1987.^[4]

From 1994 to 2011, Rich was anop-ed columnist forThe New York Times; he wrote regularly on the connections betweenmass media and American politics. His columns, now appearing inNew York Magazine, make regular references to a broad range of popular culture—including television, movies, theater and literature. In addition to his long-time work for theTimes andNew York, Rich has written for many other publications, includingThe New York Review of Books andThe New Republic.

The commentatorBill O'Reilly, host of theFox News Channel talk showThe O'Reilly Factor, criticized Rich following Rich's criticism of Fox in 2004 as having apolitically conservativebias.^[15]

Rich also attracted controversy by dismissing thehistorical-drama filmThe Passion of the Christ (2004), directed byMel Gibson, as "nothing so much as a porn movie, replete withslo-mo climaxes and pounding music for the money shots."^[16]

External videos
Presentation by Rich onThe Greatest Story Ever Sold, December 4, 2006,C-SPAN

In a January 2006 appearance onThe Oprah Winfrey Show, commenting on theJames Frey memoir scandal, Rich expanded on his usage in his column of the termtruthiness to summarize a variety of ills in culture and politics.^[17] His book,The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina (2006), criticized the American media for what he perceived as its support ofGeorge W. Bush's administration's propaganda following theSeptember 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and during the run-up to the Iraq war.^[10]

A July 2009 column focused on what Rich believes is thebigoted nature of PresidentBarack Obama's detractors.^[18] On theTea Party movement, which emerged in 2009, Rich opined that at one of their rallies they were "kowtowing to secessionists." He wrote that death threats and a brick thrown through a congressman's window were a "small-scale mimicry of "Kristallnacht" (or "night of broken glass", the November 1938 anti-Jewishpogrom inNazi Germany andAustria).^[19][20] In his essays atNew York, Rich has continued to examine the American right, including its latest revival during the candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump.

Since 2008, Rich has been a creative consultant for HBO, where he has helped initiate and develop new programming and was an Executive Producer ofVeep, the long-running comedy series created byArmando Iannucci and starringJulia Louis-Dreyfus. He was also an Executive Producer ofSuccession, the HBO drama series created byJesse Armstrong that debuted in June 2018 to critical praise.^[21][22]

Rich was also an Executive Producer for the HBO documentariesSix by Sondheim (2013), directed byJames Lapine, andBecoming Mike Nichols (2016), directed byDouglas McGrath.

Rich's journalistic honors include theGeorge Polk Award for commentary in 2005^[23] and, in 2011, the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism fromHarvard University (also his alma mater). In 2011, Rich was awarded an honorary doctorate fromThe New School.^[24] In 2016, he received the Mirror Award for Best Commentary from the Newhouse School atSyracuse University. He was inducted into theTheater Hall of Fame in 2015.

Rich was twice aPulitzer Prize finalist, in 1987 and 2005.^[25] In 2010, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from theSilurians Press Club.^[26]

Rich receivedEmmy Awards in 2015, 2016, and 2017 forVeep, which was named Outstanding Comedy Series, and in 2020 forSuccession, which was named Outstanding Drama Series.^[27] He also received aGolden Globe in 2020 forSuccession, which won the Best Drama Series prize.^[28] He has won threePeabody Awards: forSuccession in 2020, forVeep in 2017, and, in 2013, forSix by Sondheim,^[29] which was also honored with the ASCAP Deems Taylor Television Broadcast Award.

In 2011,The New Republic included him along withRachel Maddow,Newt Gingrich,Paul Ryan, etc. in an editorial roundup of the "Most Over-Rated Thinkers" of the year, calling him "an utterly conventional pundit of the old salon liberal variety".^[3]

Rich lives inManhattan with his wife, Alex Witchel, an author and journalist; they married in 1991.^[7] He has two sons from his previous marriage to Gail Winston:^[30][31]Simon Rich, a novelist and short story writer who created the television seriesMan Seeking Woman and was a writer forSaturday Night Live, andNathaniel Rich, who is a novelist, journalist, and essayist.

External videos
Booknotes interview with Rich onGhost Light: A Memoir, December 10, 2000,C-SPAN

Frank Rich's memoirGhost Light (2000) chronicles his childhood in the late 1950s and 1960s inWashington, D.C., with a focus on his lifelong adoration of the theater and the impact it had on his life.^[4]

• Rich, Frank; Aronson, Lisa (1987).The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson. New York: Knopf.ISBN 0-394-52913-8.
• Rich, Frank (1998).Hot Seat — Theater Criticism for The New York Times, 1980–1993. New York: Random House.ISBN 0-679-45300-8.
• Rich, Frank (2000).Ghost Light — A Memoir. New York: Random House.ISBN 0-375-75824-0.
• Rich, Frank (2006).The Greatest Story Ever Sold — The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina. New York:Penguin Press.ISBN 1-59420-098-X.

• Column archive atNew York magazine
• Column archive atThe New York Times
• Column archive atThe Harvard Crimson
• Appearances onC-SPAN
• Frank Rich onCharlie Rose
• Frank Rich atIMDb

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