List of The Critic characters
This is a list of characters in the animated television series The Critic.
Overview
The Sherman family
Jay Sherman
;Voiced by Jon Lovitz"New York's third most popular early-morning cable-TV film critic", 37-year-old Jay Prescott Sherman is the host of Phillips Broadcasting's Coming Attractions. His catch phrases include his exclamation of surprise, his common putdown of sub-par films and his distinctive cough/sneeze. He is known for his surly and sarcastic putdowns of nearly every film he sees. His favorite films are usually Golden-Age classics and foreign films such as The Red Balloon. He often uses the "Shermometer" to measure the films he reviews, or a list of diseases he would rather have than see a movie. He has been known to rate films on a numerical scale, in which his highest score is seven out of ten. Most of his dislike for films comes from a love for cinema that has been disillusioned by seeing the commercialism that has overtaken the film industry.
Jay is the adopted son of wealthy New-England socialites Franklin and Eleanor Sherman, who originally thought he was a monkey. He is ethnically Jewish, but did not have a religious upbringing. His date of birth is shown on his driver's license as January 26, 1957. In preschool, he was given LSD-laced Kool-Aid by guest speaker Timothy Leary, and was mistakenly sent to Attica Prison instead of summer camp as a child in the summer of 1972. He has a teenage sister named Margo and a 13-year-old son named Marty who visits often when not staying with Jay's ex-wife Ardeth.
Jay has also held several other jobs in his time, including a truck driver, speech writer for Duke's presidential campaign and a writer for the film Ghostchasers III.
Jay has won a string of prestigious awards for his career: two Pulitzer Prizes for criticism, a People's Choice Award, five Golden Globes, an Emmy Award, a PhD in film, and a B'nai B'rith Award.
Jay blames his weight problem on the fictional disorder "vitilardo", a wordplay on the skin pigmentation disorder vitiligo. His weight is suggested to be greater than a tank, as a helicopter that was originally designed to lift tanks was unable to even get him off the ground. He was also shown in a file photo on a news report as "weighing more than the entire band Los Lobos", in which he is sitting on a see-saw, lifting the entire band into the air. When he exercises, Duke often uses Jay in place of a set of dumbbells when lifting weights. His weight led to the death of a horse when he was a child, crushing it to death when Jay lied to the horse trainer about his weight so he could sit on it. Jay's stomach seems to have a mind of its own, often giving him commands that he obeys out of fear, going so far as to call it "Master". Acting on the advice of a quack public-relations expert, Jay once gained so much weight that he had to have several years worth of liposuction.
Jay is a heterosexual whose sexual and romantic relationships with women are the subject of most plotlines on the series. However, his artistic interests and effeminate mannerisms often make Jay the target of anti-gay insults from others, especially Duke; despite mainly being a parody of the liberal Ted Turner, Duke often stands in for a stereotypical "Southern redneck" personality and is depicted as bigoted against minorities and bullying in his choice of words.
It is strongly hinted in the episode "Eyes on the Prize" that Jay is bipolar, when he tells a class of cab drivers that the only thing that gets him through the day is lithium, as well as in the episode "Sherman, Woman and Child" when his daily schedule reads "7:00 MANIC 8:00 DEPRESSIVE 9:00 MANIC 10:00 DEPRESSIVE."
He also has an alter-ego in "Ethel"; Ethel is an elderly woman, whom he often pretends is his assistant/secretary, and therefore assumes her persona when answering the phone. "Ethel" only appears in the first season.
In the second first-season episode "Marty's First Date", in desperation to retrieve his son from Cuba, Jay goes to Mexico City's "Linda Ronstadt International Airport" and marries a Mexican woman in order to travel there. She then admits to him that she is only marrying him "for citizenship" and then openly states "I plan to divorce him and take half his money." It is a possibility that this may be the "second divorce" Jay mentioned in the first webisode, but was never made clear..
In the second season, Jay's character was given a renovation. He received a rounder head, bigger pupils for his eyes and a warmer personality. He also begins a long-term relationship with Alice Tompkins, a Tennessee woman living in New York whom Jay meets on the street and later hires as his personal assistant.
In the opening sequence for every episode, Jay is awakened in the morning by a disquieting phone call or radio news brief. The sequence ends at night with him watching the day's Coming Attractions episode at home, then turning off the television and going to sleep. At the end, he is seen sitting in a movie theater, eating popcorn and drinking soda as the closing credits are shown on the screen. When the credits end, an usher approaches and says, "Excuse me, sir, the show's over." Jay then delivers one of the following four responses:
Additionally, Jay shares a fifth response with Alice in the second season:
In the internet Web-Episode series that occurred after the show's cancellation, he is divorced and is involved with his new make-up lady, Jennifer.
Martin Sherman
;Voiced by Christine CavanaughJay's 12-year-old son Martin "Marty" usually stays with his mother, but visits Jay often. Like Jay, he is overweight, which causes him problems at United Nations International School. He was, however, elected eighth-grade student body president thanks to a speech written by his father, dated Fidel Castro's granddaughter, and discovered he has a gift for belly-dancing. In the second-season episode "From Chunk to Hunk", he lost a lot of weight, but found his new thin body to be more trouble than it was worth and gained it all back before the end of the episode.
Ardeth
;Voiced by Brenda Vaccaro in season 1; Rhea Perlman in season 2Jay's ex-wife, surname unknown, who fell in love with Jay as his nurse, during a period in which he was completely bandaged and gagged. She instantly regretted marrying Jay, admitting so during the wedding ceremony. They spent their wedding night playing The Newlywed Game, which they won.
Ardeth is 35 years old and spends most of the series insulting Jay or demanding more alimony. At one point, when he greets her at a school athletic competition, she tells him he has to pay her $100 every time he talks to her. Handing her a wad of cash, he replies, "Fine. Here's two hundred. Get bent!" It is implied that Ardeth cheated on Jay with the judge who presided over their divorce case when, during the hearing, they make suggestive comments and flirtatious purring sounds to each other in front of Jay. She once attempted put a voodoo hex on Jay's girlfriend Alice, despite the divorce settlement specifically forbidding such actions. Despite her dislike of Jay, she shares Jay's affection for their only son Marty and even goes so far as to admit, "We raised a great kid." She is often seen when Marty is in a show or event. She has a handsome rich personal trainer and boyfriend named Alberto.
Margo Sherman
;Voiced by Nancy CartwrightThe younger child of the Sherman family, and the only biological child of Franklin and Eleanor. She is 17 years old and is a junior at Miss Hathaway's School for Untouched Girls. Margo is an activist who often protests her mother's socialite lifestyle. She also cares greatly for Jay, making sure his girlfriends are not just dating him to get good reviews and having him escort her to the debutante ball. Jay and her horse matters most to her. In the second-season episode "A Song for Margo", she briefly dated grunge rock singer Johnny Wrath after he moved next door to the Shermans, and even considered losing her virginity to him, but discovers he was cheating on her and breaks up with him. She was redesigned for the second season.
Franklin Sherman
;Voiced by Gerrit GrahamJay's adoptive father and Eleanor's husband who speaks with a thick "Locust Valley lockjaw", wears slippers and always has a glass of brandy in his hand no matter where he goes. His mental health is uncertain, and he often acts quite erratically. He is a 64-year-old "rich eccentric". His family claims that he had a stroke. A few of his oddities include burning down the house, becoming stuck to an ice sculpture, gluing the dog and silverware to the ceiling, dressing up as the Energizer Bunny, rubbing his behind on the dinner plates, wearing underpants on his head at the dinner table, and sticking a banana in his ear which he claimed was an attempt to lure the monkey out of his head. He is also well known for dressing up as the New Year's Baby for the year 1937 and has destroyed both Picasso's Guernica and Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam via monster truck and helicopter respectively.
He is a former governor of New York, as well as a former ambassador, Cabinet member, a Rhodes scholar and a heavy contributor to the Republican Party. He was also U.S. Secretary of Balloon Doggies. When told by President George Bush that the position is a ridiculous figment of his imagination that Congress will no longer provide funding for, Sherman vehemently claims, "I didn't ask to be Secretary of Balloon Doggies, the balloon doggies demanded it." Franklin was Duke's running mate when he ran for president, though Duke tried to remove Franklin after a disastrous vice presidential debate, in which, among other gaffes, he claimed to be the first black female head of the Ku Klux Klan and that "America stinks!"
Despite his behavior, Franklin proves to be competent in some cases. In the episode "Marathon Mensch", he trains Jay to run in the New York marathon. Also in the episode "Frankie and Ellie Get Lost", much to his wife's surprise, Franklin proves that he can be a problem-solver and an apt handyman by building a shelter, a signal fire, and training an ape as a butler. In "Sherman of Arabia", he manages to get the president to lead a rescue mission for Jay due to his support for the Republicans. In the episode "Lady Hawke", it is revealed that gin is to Franklin what spinach is to Popeye the Sailor.
It was also revealed during a period newsreel from "Frankie and Ellie Get Lost" that he was completely sane and had never had a drop to drink in his life until Ted Kennedy spiked the punch at his wedding.