Background
Tucker was born in Manhattan, New York City, New York, and raised in Stamford, Connecticut.
Tucker was born in Manhattan, New York City, New York, and raised in Stamford, Connecticut.
He earned a bachelor’s degree in English from New York University. While attending New York University, he began writing freelance reviews for The Village Voice, SoHo Weekly News, and Rolling Stone. From 1979 to 1983, Tucker was the rock critic for the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner.
From 1983 to 1990, he worked at The Philadelphia Inquirer, first as the newspaper’s rock critic, and then its television critic.
In 1990, he joined Entertainment Weekly (a Time Incorporated publication) as a founding staffer. He was the magazine"s television critic, Digital Video Disc critic and an editor-at-large until 2013, except for one year (2005-2006) as film critic at New York Magazine.
Since 1982, Tucker has been a rock and popular music critic for the National Public Radio (National Public Radio) talk show Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Tucker has appeared many times on television, including multiple appearances on The Today Show, Good Morning America, The Charlie Rose Show, and The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson.
He appears in the 1984 documentary The Gospel According to First Rate (at Lloyd's) Green.
He is interviewed on-camera in Cartoon College, a documentary about the history of comics. Tucker’s reviews have provoked some notable responses from his subjects. In August 1980, Billy Joel, enraged by a negative review of his music Tucker had written in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, tore up the review on stage during one of his concerts.
Tucker’s negative reviews of Seth MacFarlane’s animated series Family Guy resulted in a number of MacFarlane counter-criticisms, including a scene in which the baby Stewie Griffin breaks the neck of an Entertainment Weekly writer widely assumed to be Tucker.