As Al and I were completing our two years running The Simpsons, Matt Groening came to us with a new idea: an animated Krusty the Clown spin-off. We developed the concept, imagining Krusty as a single dad in New York, with a crabby makeup lady and a crazy, Ted Turner–like boss.
Matt turned us down, deciding he’d rather do a live-action Krusty “reality show” in which Dan Castellaneta (who voices the character) would go around having adventures, like working on a tuna boat or delivering a baby.
That makes two shows that didn’t happen.
A year later, in 1993, Jim Brooks told us he wanted to do a sitcom set at a morning program like the Today show. Al and I kicked it around, and decided to focus on the show’s Gene Shalit–like movie critic. We fleshed it out with all the rejected Krusty show ideas: single dad in New York, crabby makeup lady, Ted Turner boss. Comedy, like composting, involves smart recycling.
Jim liked the idea and asked us if we were fans of Jon Lovitz—he’d just seen him in Penny Marshall’s A League of Their Own.
We loved Lovitz and had had him on The Simpsons three times. Al and I were more than happy to develop a live-action “critic pilot” for Lovitz. But we neglected to tell Lovitz. When we finally presented a finished script to him, he said, “I can’t do a TV show! I’m a MOVIE STAR!!!” (Said in the most Lovitz way possible.)
In all fairness, he did have three movies lined up: City Slickers II: The Legend of Curly’s Gold, Trapped in Paradise, and Rob Reiner’s North. (Lovitz would later say, “Three movies, thrrree BOMBS!”)
Lovitz was about to walk out of our meeting when Al and I said, in desperation, “What if it’s animated?”
Just like that, he was in, and The Critic was born. It became the only animated show in history where the very last creative decision was to make it a cartoon.
Based on the success of The Simpsons, Jim Brooks got a great deal with ABC. No matter what idea he came in with, they had to make twenty-two episodes of it. They couldn’t say no.
Excitedly, we went with Jim to ABC with the pitch: an animated show about a film critic, starring Jon Lovitz.
“No,” they said.
After some negotiation, they finally agreed to make thirteen episodes. This was the start of The Critic’s rocky road on TV.
Ya Gotta Lovitz
I first saw Jon Lovitz when I was working at The Tonight Show. L.A.’s improv troupe the Groundlings were guests, and a very young Lovitz performed his character Tommy Flanagan, the pathological liar. Even then, I saw he was special.
I met Jon years later at a Simpsons table reading where he was guest-starring as Marge’s prom date Artie Ziff. Before we began, I mentioned a story from the newspaper: “It says thieves are cutting off people’s hands in downtown L.A. to get their Rolexes.”
“You mean like THIS ONE?” said Jon, shoving his fat Rolex in my face. He is the master of upbeat bluster and unearned self-confidence. But is that the real Jon Lovitz?
It’s an interesting philosophical point: it’s not who Jon is; it’s merely a character he plays twenty-four hours a day. In unguarded moments, Jon can be shy and self-critical. He’s always apologizing to me for no good reason.
JON LOVITZ APOLOGIZES FOR NO GOOD REASON
“I would get all frustrated, and sometimes I’d give Mike and Al a hard time. I felt bad about that, because they couldn’t have been nicer. I actually apologized to Mike about giving him a hard time, and he said, ‘I don’t have any memory of that. I just always remember your being very nice and very pleasant.’ Oh good! Because sometimes I do get a little cranky.”
Jon also plays classical piano, speaks fluent French, and sings opera. His stage debut was in—picture this—Death of a Salesman.
On The Critic we surrounded him with a truly eclectic cast, ranging from the voice of Babe, the sheepherding pig (Christine Kavanaugh), to soft-core porn actor Charles Napier. We had the world’s greatest impressionist (Maurice LaMarche) and the man of a thousand accents (Nick Jameson); between them, they’d do sixty characters per episode—and we paid by the character! Everyone’s favorite actor on the show wasn’t an actor at all—the role of the makeup woman, Doris, was played by Doris Grau, The Simpsons’ script supervisor.
The hardest part to cast was Margo, critic Jay Sherman’s sympathetic sister. We hired and fired four different actresses, including Margaret Cho, before realizing the perfect Margo was right in front of us: Nancy Cartwright.
“For me,” Nancy said, “it was fantastic because I wasn’t Bart, Nelson, Ralph, Kearney, Database, Todd Flanders . . . I was actually going to get to play a girl! I had some ideas at first, but then they just said they wanted me to do it as me.”
Designing these characters was a lot harder. We didn’t have a visionary artist like Matt Groening, so we put together an amazing team: David Silverman (The Simpsons), Rich Moore (Wreck-It Ralph), Everett Peck (Duckman), and David Cutler (The Nightmare Before Christmas). I’m afraid we designed it by committee, with us nonartistic producers mixing and matching different parts of different characters. It was a Frankenstein process, and some people said Jay Sherman even looked like Frankenstein, with his flat square head. Once the show debuted, we learned that Jay was coincidentally a dead ringer for real-life film critic James Wolcott.
It turns out Jay Sherman looked just like Vanity Fair critic James Wolcott. You’ll have to Google him to find out—it also turns out it’s easier to print a picture of Muhammad than James Wolcott.
Al and I gave Jay Sherman two memorable catchphrases: “It stinks!” (which needs no explanation) and “Hotchie-motchie!” (which needs lots). I heard “Hotchie-motchie!” just once as a kid, and I never forgot it. It was a cry of dismay uttered by a member of Hermine’s Royal Lilliputians, a troupe of performing little people.
We hired a crackerjack writing team, about half of them Harvard film nerds—in fact, The Critic’s Slavic restaurateur, Vlada, was named after our film professor Vlada Petric. (The character design of Vlada is based on Hungarian Simpsons animator Gábor Csupó.)
It was a boys’ club—about a dozen men working on the whole production. But in our defense, two of those twelve men have since become women. Top that, Transparent!
We also had a consulting writer on the show—a funny kid who’d come in one or two days a week. His name was Judd Apatow.
JUDD APATOW ON WORKING AT THE CRITIC
“Mike and Al had an enormous amount of energy and patience. They did something I’ve never seen anybody do since: They didn’t get up all day long. We would go in and it would be like ten in the morning until sometimes between eight and ten at night. And Mike and Al wouldn’t stand up all day! They would just sit in their chairs. Al would have a cup filled with M&M’s and peanuts and pretzels and whatever he was grazing on. And they would just pitch jokes for ten to twelve straight hours. They almost never even left the room to listen to sound mixes or have meetings. Now that I’ve run shows, I’ve always wondered, When did they have meetings? I don’t remember Mike and Al ever leaving the room! They just had such patience and loved being in the room.”
A Tale of Two Critics
The Critic debuted to great ratings and rave reviews. Two days later, my assistant Dee walked in with a large cardboard box, bulging at the seams.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Hate mail,” she replied.
The sensibility that had served us so well on The Simpsons was too raw and edgy for ABC’s family-friendly audience. Viewers were particularly incensed by a scene where Jay sleeps with an actress on their first date. (I’m glad we cut the line where the critic says, “Even my orgasms feel better!”) Ironically, throughout our run, we were the top-rated show on TV among children—even bigger than The Simpsons.
The ratings eroded fast, and ABC pulled us off the air after six weeks. Despite this annoyance, they had been very supportive throughout the entire process. At a meeting with network president Bob Iger, he gestured to a wall-size chart of ABC’s programs and asked, “Where on this schedule do you see your show fitting in?”
I muttered, “Sunday night, on Fox, after The Simpsons.”
And that’s just where we went.
Jim Brooks managed to move The Critic from ABC to Fox. It was a huge deal, requiring the cooperation of French and German production companies. It was the first time those two countries had collaborated since the Vichy government. It turned out to be just as successful.
Fox slated us to go on after The Simpsons—they’d tried eight different series in that slot, and nothing had worked. To launch the series, Jim Brooks decided we’d do a crossover episode on The Simpsons, where the critic judges the Springfield Film Festival.
Crossovers are a television tradition: The Beverly Hillbillies visited Petticoat Junction; The Love Boat went to Fantasy Island; the Jetsons crossed time to meet the Flintstones. Jim Brooks did them all the time, mixing characters from his three sitcoms, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda, and Phyllis. As a kid, I used to love crossovers—they showed me that all these characters on different shows lived in the same universe and that they were all friends.
When it came time to do the episode, there was a huge outcry from the Simpsons staff. Showrunner David Mirkin was on board with it, but the rest of the staff said, “WE WILL NOT ALLOW THIS!”
What was especially hurtful was that our most vocal opponents were also our friends. People Al and I had hired onto The Simpsons were fighting against us.
But the loudest mouth in the room belonged to a writer who had just been hired at the show. He’d been there only a few weeks, but decided he knew best what was appropriate for The Simpsons. (He didn’t last long at the show.)
We went to Jim Brooks to report on the insurrection, and he uttered one of my favorite lines in a lifetime of great lines: “When did this become a democracy?”
We proceeded to do the episode, entirely written and produced by the Critic staff.
The Simpsons writers had put up so much resistance that we worked extra hard to make it a great show. It has since become a fan favorite, generating at least one classic Simpsons line: While everyone at the film festival is booing Mr. Burns, he asks Smithers, “Are they saying boo?”
Smithers replies, “No, they’re saying boo-urns! Boo-urns!”
When the show finally aired, all the Simpsons writers who’d opposed the idea were contractually still able to get producing credit on the episode if they wanted it. Indeed they wanted it; they all took a paycheck for it, too. Every one of them took credit and pay for a show where their only contribution was trying to keep it from happening.
Well, not everyone. The one person who didn’t take credit was Matt Groening, who discreetly took his name off the show. I don’t think we noticed at first, and I believe it’s the only time on any Simpsons episode that Matt’s name doesn’t appear in the credits. This led someone in postproduction to leak the fact to the Los Angeles Times, which ran with the story. Matt said he did it because it “violates the Simpsons universe,” adding, “Through all the years of The Simpsons, we have been careful about maintaining their uniqueness.”
Jim Brooks came to our defense, saying Matt was ungrateful for all the work we had done on his show: “For years, Al and Mike were two guys who worked their hearts out on this show, staying up until four in the morning to get it right. . . . The Critic is their shot and he should be giving them his support.”
This was Antietam at The Simpsons, the bloodiest conflict of our Civil War, and in hindsight, it wasn’t that big a deal.
Still, there was so much bitterness over it that years later, when we were doing DVD commentary on the episode, all that resentment came pouring out. It was so bilious that Jim said, “This is terrible—we can’t use this.” So, for the only time in our history, we erased the track and did a second commentary. Jim gets mad on that one, too!
Matt Groening and I have laughed about it since. The Simpsons would go on to do crossovers with Family Guy, The X-Files, and Futurama. Matt had no problem with that last one.
He Who Must Not Be Named
The president of Fox who bought The Critic to put on after The Simpsons got fired before the show actually aired. The new president who came in just hated the show.
The Critic got stellar ratings in its debut on Fox. He called, not to congratulate us, but to say, “How well do you think it will do without any publicity?” Huh? We had just given him a successful show and here he was refusing to publicize it.
We were all baffled. Lovitz recalls, “I called Jim Brooks to see why it was happening, and he said, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this.’”
We aired ten episodes on Fox, and the network president phoned after eight of them to say how much he hated the show.
Once he called us in for a meeting. He played an episode on his monitor to demonstrate how “bad” our show was. When his staff started laughing, he snapped at them, “Why are you laughing? This isn’t funny!”
After six weeks, he canceled the show and replaced it with a series he had developed called House of Buggin’. Maybe the problem with The Critic was not enough buggin’.
The final irony was that this guy quit as Fox president a few months later. He came, canceled our show, and left without a trace. It was like he was a demon from hell summoned up solely to cancel The Critic before descending back into the fiery cauldron where he belongs.
There’s a rule in show business that you never badmouth anyone by name, because somewhere down the road, you may want to work with them again. That’s usually a good rule.
But this Fox president was named John Matoian.
John Matoian. John Matoian. John Matoian. John Matoian. John Matoian.
The next year we had an offer to revive The Critic at UPN, a new network that had just started up. But they wanted to dumb down our content and shift the focus from Jay Sherman to his son, Marty, and his child friends. I said no, that wasn’t the show. Plus, I couldn’t bear the possibility of being canceled on three networks in three years.
The Critic was not dead yet. During the 2000 dot-com boom, Al and I were asked to make original Critic shorts for the internet. We’d be using Flash animation, meaning we could produce a cartoon in nine days instead of nine months. We’d be able to parody movies while they were still in theaters. Al and I reunited the old cast and wrote and produced ten short cartoons. Then, for reasons I’ll never understand, the production company sat on the shorts for ten months. It actually took longer to get shorts on the net than to do fully animated episodes for the networks.
That production company went bust, and The Critic was finally finished. It was fun making the show and I loved working with Lovitz. But in two years with the guy, he never learned my name. He always referred to Al Jean and me as “Al and Jean.” That’s one thing he could apologize for . . .
More than two decades later, people still tell me how much they love the series. It’s hard to believe about a show full of parodies of now-obscure nineties movies. It’s a little dated—in fact, every single episode opens with a shot of the World Trade Center!
Lovitz respects me as his boss.
You can still see The Critic on the Crackle and Reelz networks, and crisp copies of every episode are posted on YouTube. We’re still considering partnering with the Jehovah’s Witnesses to go door-to-door with the show. Because it’s our belief that there’s no medium so small The Critic can’t fail in it.
I’ll give the last word to Jon Lovitz, the guy who didn’t want to do the show in the first place (because he’s a MOVIE STAR!):
“If you go on my Twitter feed, every week you can see people asking about it. And I’d love to do it again. I’ve tried. But Al’s doing The Simpsons, and Mike said go ahead but he doesn’t want to do it himself. I’d do a Kickstarter, I’d do this or that. I even said, ‘Why don’t we do it as a live sitcom? But it’s just sitting there . . . and meanwhile millions of fans want it back.”
AL JEAN ON THE CRITIC
“I think the last thing Mike and I argued about was a thing in The Critic. We were doing a parody of Orson Welles doing a commercial about peas. I think I wanted to extend it into the black or something, and he didn’t. That would have been twenty-two years ago. The last creative difference we had.”
(AUTHOR’S NOTE: Al wanted Orson Welles to say, after exiting screen, “Oh, what luck! There’s a French fry stuck in my beard,” followed by eating noises. It seemed like overkill. I hated the joke . . . and every single other person on planet Earth loved it. LOVED IT! Someone recently posted the clip on Twitter, calling it “one of the greatest jokes in TV history.” I guess Al was right.)