The Critic
"It stinks!" Jon Lovitz voiced Jay Sherman, a New York film critic — cold and elitist on the air, gentle and self-doubting everywhere else — whose review show tore apart movie parodies like Honey, I Ate the Kids and Abe Lincoln: Pet Detective. Cancelled by two networks in two years, it became one of the 90s' great cult cartoons.
The Critic came from Al Jean and Mike Reiss, writing partners who had run the third and fourth seasons of The Simpsons, with Simpsons godfather James L. Brooks as their fellow executive producer. The show's DNA traces to a spin-off pitch Matt Groening turned down — Jean and Reiss had sketched a series about Krusty the Clown as a single father in New York with a prickly makeup lady and an eccentric mogul boss, and when that died, the concept was reworked around a new lead. Brooks recommended Jon Lovitz for the part based on A League of Their Own, and when Lovitz initially passed because of film commitments, the series became animated at the last moment.
The result was Jay Sherman: a 36-year-old New York film critic hosting a cable review show called Coming Attractions, armed with the catchphrase "It stinks!" Every episode overflowed with movie parodies — a musical Apocalypse Now, The Cockroach King, Scent of a Jackass — and real critics like Gene Siskel, Roger Ebert, and Rex Reed occasionally dropped in to voice themselves. Hans Zimmer wrote the theme.
ABC premiered the show on January 26, 1994, and cancelled it after 13 episodes. Fox picked it up for 1995, scheduled it right after The Simpsons, and promoted it with the famous crossover episode "A Star Is Burns" — but moved it out of the timeslot after five episodes and let it die that May, 23 episodes into its run. It has been called the first major non-family animated sitcom in primetime, and its afterlife proved the audience was there all along: a cult following grew through weekend reruns on Comedy Central, and in 2000–2001 Jay Sherman returned in ten Flash-animated webisodes on AtomFilms and Shockwave.com — an early experiment in reviving a dead show on the internet. By 2006, IGN was ranking The Critic among the top ten primetime animated series ever made.
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