Three decades ago—on January 26, 1994, to be precise—two glorious words graced the ears of 26 million ABC viewers for the first time: “It stinks.” Cartoon film critic Jay Sherman (voiced by Jon Lovitz) had a massive audience but would be gone a year and a half later. The brainchild of early Springfield residents James L. Brooks, Al Jean, and Mike Reiss, The Critic may have had a short life, but its legacy lives on. Personally, I can’t untangle myself from Jay Sherman. But as lovely as it has been to be compared to a guy who takes literal orders from his stomach and whose ex-wife regards him with the warmth of a guard at Abu Ghraib, I can’t deny the show’s impact on my life. It was my first exposure to a broader film culture.
The Critic has been with me my entire adult life and most of my childhood; the jokes from its 23-episode original run are never far from lips. I remain one of the few, the proud, still using the word “Duke-a-licious,” a situation that can only be described as a “Duke-tastrophe.” When I sat down to rewatch the show this year, I faced another Duke-tastrophe: I am now the same age as Jay Sherman, work in his field, and share similar opinions about the sequels and reboots that get made over actual movies. It stinks. It all stinks.
I was already obsessed with movies and TV when The Critic came to town. Nursing between six and 11 Coca-Colas a day, I’d bounce on my couch in a caffeine-induced bender and pray aloud to the gods of HBO to play Batman, Beetlejuice, or Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure next. Stuck in my Tim Burton cul-de-sac, I’d suffer through the afternoon until The Simpsons began its nightly rerun marathon. When ads for The Critic, a new show “from the creators of The Simpsons” about a guy who “hates everything he sees,” began airing during Home Improvement, who was I to resist?
My parents didn’t have time to worry about my viewing habits. My mom was diagnosed with M.S. shortly after I was born, and my dad owned a small business when he wasn’t cooking for, picking up after, and driving around my sister and me. There was no time to monitor, but my dad would facilitate my TV addiction. It was the only way to shut me up. When South Park premiered in 1997, he taped it for me because it aired after bedtime. When Bigger, Longer & Uncut came out two years later, he defied the box-office attendant’s warning that the movie wasn’t appropriate for 11-year-olds with a resigned “I know” and escorted me into the theater. Decades later, he told me he figured I’d be fine. How wrong he was.
Rising from the ashes of a Today Show parody and a failed Krusty The Clown spinoff set in New York, The Critic follows the tragic tale of Dr. Jay Sherman, PhD, a Pulitzer Prize-winning adopted son of a billionaire, who rakes in a six-figure salary saying Jurassic Park II “stinks” on his nationally syndicated film review show, Coming Attractions. Despite the appearance of a charmed life, Jay is often the focus of New York’s ire. Every episode opens with him receiving bad news, a bird stealing his toupee, and him cracking the ice at Rockefeller Center. But Jay isn’t as cynical as his catchphrase makes him appear. He’s a vigorous defender of the arts who, in the name of good movies, refuses to cow to the demands of his Ted Turner-inspired boss, Duke Philips (voiced by a brilliant Charles Napier). Jay spent his career criticizing Hollywood hacks, instilling in viewers that, maybe, not every movie was good. The message stuck.
Art always seemed under attack on The Critic, in absurd and relevant ways. His father smashed Guernica for fun, and his boss, a proto-Jack Donaghy, digitally created ad space in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. In the world of Critic creators Jean and Reiss, even arthouse fairy tales like The Red Balloon can become The Red Balloon 2: Revenge Of The Red Balloon. The unsubtle parody “Clint Eastwood is Dirty Harry in Robo Canine Cop And A Half 2" made sure I wouldn’t look at my precious RoboCop 2 the same.
While most of the references went over my head, one doesn’t need to know the specific works to find “Take that, Guernica!” funny. The Critic always excelled at jokes over plot, playing to its grade-school audience that hadn’t seen Goodfellas or The Piano. Thankfully, the spoofs were never too sophisticated, often simple black-out sketches the size of a Mad Magazine panel with targets only a half-step removed from the real thing. Nightmare Before Christmas became Nightmare Before Hanukkah, in a sequence that probably took way more time than it was worth. Meanwhile, a Goodfellas parody can be a setup for another of Jay’s memorable catchphrases, “Hi, guy.” The under-10 crowd might not get the Picasso jokes, but Jay’s ridiculously basic catchphrases, like “buy my book” and “hotchie motchie,” gave us plenty to chew on as the deeper references wormed into our subconscious.
Like all good criticism, The Critic expanded my view of the wider cinematic world. More than parodies of memorable moments, the show introduced me to Orson Welles, whose blocky frame, “country goodness and green pea-ness” became a fixture of my pop culture understanding. The Critic didn’t always treat him kindly, often reverting to fat jokes, but voice actor Maurice LaMarche’s impression is still what I hear in my head when I think of Welles’ dulcet tones.
The Critic often had a complex relationship with creators. Jay’s pitch for his second Pulitzer, an essay entitled “Chaplin, Polanski, And Woody: Three Men And A Little Lady,” teases a more complex, systematic situation. Nevertheless, the show’s opening credits and Han Zimmer’s theme are a direct homage to Woody Allen’s Manhattan and its use of the New York skyline and George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody In Blue.”
Of course, the show made critics worthy of celebrity, too. At that point, the extent of my interest in film criticism was the 1993 book Movies On TV And Video Cassette and the Blockbuster Video guide. But the series aired at the height of Siskel and Ebert’s television fame, so in the critics’ section of L’ane Riche, the exclusive restaurant Jay frequents, Gene Shalit raves about linguine, Pauline Kael gets a name check, and Rex Reed is calling Ebert for a job. The show wasn’t a critical darling, but despite getting panned by Siskel and Ebert on At The Movies, the pair appeared in the second-season classic, “Siskel & Ebert & Jay & Alice.” It’s still the show’s most famous episode.
After its 1995 cancelation, the series existed as a dream only accessed through the Simpsons crossover episode “A Star Is Burns.” The crossover might be controversial for Matt Groening, but it’s a fan favorite responsible for some of the show’s most beloved jokes, like “Saying the quiet part loud,” “That’s the joke,” and “Boo-urns.” Quoting those lines was my only connection to the Shermometer until Comedy Central added the show to its late-night offerings in 1997. Couched between other comedies far too adult for my delicate disposition, like Dr. Katz and the USA “Up All Night” classic Duckman, The Critic played the sleepover circuit. My friends and I would stay up well past midnight to glimpse “Ghostchasers III,” cackling our heads off at a skyscraper-sized Ed Koch, asking, “How’m I doing?” Who cares if I didn’t know who Ed Koch was? I didn’t know who Michael Dukakis was, either.
The Critic offered a primer for the film and cultural canon. It gave me junk food parodies of The Lion King and Indiana Jones and prepared my brain for a more expansive pop-culture universe populated by a flirty Elephant Man and a ghostly Orson Welles. But more than that, it instilled in me a belief that good movies were worth defending and that movies, in general, were an interest one could have. The people who make movies and the people who talk about them are all part of the same absurd, hostile, and fascinating world, a world I wanted to join.
Over the years, my love for The Critic receded into the background. But whenever I see another Jurassic Park sequel, a voice from the deep recesses of my memory cries out: “It stinks.”