The Critic


The Critic is an American animated sitcom revolving around the life of New York film critic Jay Sherman, voiced by Jon Lovitz. It was created by writing partners Al Jean and Mike Reiss, who had previously worked as writers and showrunners on the third and fourth seasons of The Simpsons. Twenty-three episodes of The Critic were produced. The show was first broadcast on ABC in 1994 and finished its original run on Fox in 1995.
Episodes featured film parodies with notable examples including a musical version of Apocalypse Now; Howard Stern's End ; Honey, I Ate the Kids ; The Cockroach King ; Abe Lincoln: Pet Detective ; and Scent of a Jackass and Scent of a Wolfman. The show often referenced popular films, such as Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory and The Godfather, and routinely lampooned Marlon Brando, Orson Welles, Woody Allen, and Dudley Moore, usually as his character Arthur Bach from the 1981 film Arthur.
Despite the ratings improving, The Critic was cancelled after two seasons. It continued to air through reruns on Comedy Central and then on Locomotion. From February 1, 2000 to 2001, ten webisodes were produced using Macromedia Shockwave; these webisodes were broadcast on AtomFilms.com and Shockwave.com.
In the late 2000s, reruns of the show aired again on ReelzChannel in the US and on Teletoon's programming block Teletoon at Night in Canada.

Premise

The show follows the life of a 36-year-old film critic from New York named Jay Sherman. His televised review show, Coming Attractions, airs on the Philips Broadcasting cable network. Sherman is cold, mean-spirited, and elitist as a movie critic, but in his everyday life he has a gentler nature and is filled with self-doubt. His signature line, upon seeing a terrible film, is "It stinks!" Each episode is full of film references and parodies. Some of the secondary characters that are a part of Jay's story include his zany adoptive parents and their biological daughter Margo, his well-meaning son Marty, the Australian film star Jeremy Hawke, his snide make-up lady Doris, his ex-wife Ardeth, and his boss Duke Phillips. In the second season, Jay acquires a love interest: a Southern woman named Alice Tompkins, who later becomes his long-term girlfriend.

Cast and characters

Production

The show was created by Al Jean and Mike Reiss, who, along with James L. Brooks, served as executive producers. The Critic was a joint production of Gracie Films, the same company behind 20th Century Fox Television cartoon The Simpsons, in association with Columbia Pictures Television. The show's animation was done by Film Roman, who were also still working on The Simpsons at this time. It was co-produced by Patric Verrone.
Jean and Reiss were showrunners on The Simpsons and had been approached by series creator Matt Groening to design a spin-off centered on Krusty the Clown. Their pitch featured many similarities to The Critic – Krusty would be a single father in New York with a prickly make-up lady and an eccentric boss resembling Ted Turner. Groening turned down the idea, instead wanting the Krusty spin-off to be a live-action series led by the character's animated voice, Dan Castellaneta.
In 1993, Brooks approached Jean and Reiss with the idea of a sitcom based on a morning television program. The pair adapted their Krusty pitch to the new idea. Brooks recommended Jon Lovitz as the lead, based on his performance in A League of Their Own. Lovitz initially turned down the role due to his commitments with three upcoming films, so, at the last moment, the series became animated.
The show sometimes included appearances of real-life critics, such as Gene Shallit, Rex Reed, Gene Siskel, and Roger Ebert, who provided their own voices. When choosing things to parody, Reiss and Jean made a conscious decision to find the right balance between current pop culture and references that would stand the test of time.

Broadcast

The Critic was "the first major non-family sitcom animated program to appear in primetime." The show started out on ABC on January 26, 1994, where it aired 13 episodes. It was cancelled by the network after half a season and was then moved onto Fox the following year, where it ran for another ten-episode season. Around this time, in an attempt to popularize the show, it was included in a "shameless plug" crossover with The Simpsons and was scheduled in the timeslot immediately after The Simpsons. But despite improvement of the ratings, Fox moved it to a different timeslot after five episodes and also cancelled it after this run had finished airing in May 1995. According to The TV IV, nine scripts were already written for the planned third season, and the show was going to be moved to UPN, but an agreement was not reached. Fox refused to officially cancel the show until much later. The show was not renewed on any network and effectively became cancelled. The show returned in Flash-animated webisode form in 2000–2001, for a third season, with 10 three- to five-minute installments. In Spain, it aired on Canal+ in the 1990s and on Cartoon Network from 2000 to 2001 through a nightly block aimed at adults, vaguely as a pre-beta to Adult Swim, both times alongside Duckman.

Design

Four people have a design credit on the show: David Silverman, Rich Moore, David Cutler, and Everett Peck. Silverman designed the look of Jay Sherman. Moore and Cutler designed the general look of the show including some of the backgrounds and supporting cast. The character of Doris was based on Peck's drawings. Cutler helped standardize all these designers' styles. Moore was the supervising director and thus oversaw a lot of the design process; he was also responsible for how the action would play out and how each shot would be framed. Rich Moore explains "the design of Jay Sherman began as a sketch done by David Silverman" on a napkin/place-mat in a restaurant. He was designed as "Kaufmanesque", and Jim Brooks liked the design, so his design remained much the same for the pilot episode. Moore had his reservations as the character had a "flat head and tiny eyes that were hard to act with" and was composed of shapes that were difficult to turn in a 3D space. It was decided, however, that the drawing encapsulated the humanity and reality of the character, so it was left unchanged. Nonetheless, over the course of the two seasons, the design was altered slightly. The flat head was made more round, and his eyes became bigger, to make Sherman more appealing and easier to animate. The design team never intended to make the characters too cartoony as it would not have fit tonally with the type of show. The characters were designed via a general think-tank process of "what do we like about the characters and what are we trying to say about them?". Quick sketches were completed in front of the full creative team, after a discussion about characters, which were then critically analysed. In particular, the design of the parents caused some issues. Jim Brooks described the father as a "crazy wasp." The designs were eventually based on a photo of a professor and his wife. Moore explains that the animation should never "step on the voices or the writing."
Vlada, an Eastern European restaurateur, was named after Jean and Reiss's film professor at Harvard University, Vlada Petrić. The character's physical appearance was based on Gábor Csupó, a Hungarian animator on the early seasons of The Simpsons. Though some believed Sherman to look like the film critic James Wolcott, this was not intentional.

Casting

Script supervisor Doris Grau, who had played Lunchlady Doris on The Simpsons, was cast as Sherman's make-up lady, Doris. Four actresses, including Margaret Cho, were hired and dismissed as the voice of Sherman's younger sister Margo. The role eventually went to the voice of Bart Simpson, Nancy Cartwright, who was pleased to finally be voicing a female. Duke Phillips, Jay's Ted Turner-esque boss, was played by Charles Napier, using his real voice. Due to the sheer number of film and TV parodies, the team also sought character actors who could play many different roles. During the audition process, they asked them to perform their acts, which Reiss described as "very entertaining." Maurice LaMarche impressed Jean by doing "perfect" impressions. LaMarche even beat out genuine Australians for the role of Australian actor Jeremy Hawke. He was often asked to work on his accent of a pop culture figure related to media just released or that would have been released by the time of the episode's airing. Depending on who could do the voice better, the characters were divided up between Nick Jameson and LaMarche. Each would play about 20–30 characters per show. According to LaMarche, he played twenty-seven characters in one episode. He specialized in impressions, while Jameson's specialty was accents and dialects.

Relationship with ''The Simpsons''

Nathan Rabin of The A.V. Club explains "in creating The Critic, Al Jean and Mike Reiss set out to make the show as dissimilar from The Simpsons as humanly possible". Nevertheless, there are many similarities between the two series. Gen X TV: The Brady Bunch to Melrose Place argues that The Critic became a critical success while other animated shows of the early 1990s flopped was because "the makers of these shows failed to realize that The Simpsons didn't become a hit because of animation because of its style of humor", and says that The Critic understood this. It adds the show "took the media-obsession/parody portions of The Simpsons and created a separate show around them". Planet Simpson describes the show as "the closest thing The Simpsons ever had to a spin-off." The Critic also shares The Simpsons love for criticizing Fox and the audience, such as Jay's frequent line "You're watching Fox, shame on you" and "The Critic will be right back, you TV-addicted couch monkeys" before the show went to commercial break. Rabin said "The Critic made its protagonist the anti-Homer Simpson. Where Homer is a booze-sodden everyman, Jay Sherman is an unabashed elitist. Where Homer is a rudely physical creature, Jay leads a life of the mind. Homer is a slob. Jay is a snob." While "Springfield is very aggressively and deliberately Anywhere, United States, The Critic is an extended Valentine to a certain kind of pointy-headed East Coast elitism." PopMatters said "The Critics humor is very much in the spirit of The Simpsons, taken in a more brazenly surreal direction."
Matt Groening had no part in its inception, and wanted to make this very clear, so he would not be associated with any success or failure the show would have. He claimed that in the public consciousness, this was his show—a direct spin-off to The Simpsons.
Many voice actors appear in both The Simpsons and The Critic, and regulars on both shows have made cameos in the others. For example, Nancy Cartwright, Doris Grau, Tress MacNeille, Russi Taylor, and Jon Lovitz have all played primary/secondary characters on both shows. Maurice LaMarche, who played many characters on The Critic, "played George C. Scott getting hit in the groin with a football" in the crossover episode. His only line was "Ow, my groin." He also did Jay's belch in the episode.