All Hail, King Dork: The Brief But Memorable Life of "The Critic"

[Ubiquitous]

When it comes to films, many people ignore the critics since they seem to get
it wrong, though there are some things they get right. For years, though,
critics were idolized because they were the people who knew what was real and
what was crap. They knew just what movies were supposed to be idolized, and
what movies were supposed to be hated. Naturally, critics were ripe for
satire.

Enter the ABC series The Critic which is about the life of the melancholy
mensch of movies, Jay Sherman, voiced by Jon Lovitz. Jay is a film critic
with a show called Coming Attractions for the Phillips Broadcast Network. Jay
is bald, overweight and divorced, all of which forces him to find solace
through criticizing things, both on and off the movie screen. His knack for
being overtly critical makes him somewhat of an unlikeable protagonist. He
seems to be one of the last honest critics left in the business. The nicest
people to him are his son Marty, voiced by Christine Cavanaugh, and his movie
star friend Jeremy Hawke, voiced by Maurice LaMarche.

Aside from this, most other people, even the random New Yorkers he meets on
the street, cause him as much grief as holidays do for Charlie Brown. The
pilot episode of the series sees Jay start dating a movie star named Valerie
Fox, voiced by Jennifer Lien, who is a caricature of Sharon Stone’s role as
Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct. To prolong the relationship and avoid
the eventual break-up, Jay puts off seeing her movie. However, she turns out
to be so phenomenally bad in it, he knows he has to do the right thing and
review the movie poorly. She reveals her true intention which was to sleep
with him so he would give her a great review, something foreseen by his
adoptive mother Eleanor, voiced by Judith Ivey.

While much of the episode is spent focusing on the development of Jay and
Valerie’s relationship, one of the tender moments comes from a spoof on the
ballroom dancing scene in the Disney classic, Beauty and the Beast. During
the scene, Jay is home pretending to be sick so he won’t have to see
Valerie’s movie. She and Jay dance while his vacuum and toilet bowl sing
“Beauty and King Dork”, named for something that was spray-painted on his car
earlier in the episode. It’s beautiful because it shows that despite what the
world may think of him, Jay is a lovable guy capable of loving more than
artsy films like those of Wes Anderson.

Season 1 of The Critic had a different tone than the episodes from Season 2
on FOX and the much later online shorts. Jay is a character you root for in
the same sense that you root for Rhoda Morgenstern from The Mary Tyler Moore
Show. You know the character is doing the best they can but the world seems
to be hell-bent on making them miserable. Listening to Jay’s self-deprecating
remarks about how unliked he is, are like listening to your best friend when
they’ve had a bad day. Most of the episodes show Jay being better-off ever
after, as seen in the second episode of the series, “Marty’s First Date.”

In this episode, Jay’s son Marty begins dating the daughter of the Cuban
diplomat to the United Nations. However, in order to remain close to her, he
stores away on her plane to Cuba. Jay, however, has to go the longer route.
After being detained in an airport, his show frightens people and the station
runs a disclaimer that he is mentally ill. He is then mistaken for a mental
patient, and is sent on a boat for the mentally ill. While on the boat, he
marries a woman he met there for citizenship, though she is never seen again.
In the end, Marty gets the girl while Jay is last seen about to be killed by
firing squad for insulting Fidel Castro. But then he mentions he reviewed The
Mambo Kings highly, which apparently gives him a stay of execution.

Many episodes of The Critic featured their own original plots, while other
episodes include a bevy of movie parodies in them, as evidenced by the fourth
episode of Season 1, “Miserable.” In this episode, spring is in the air, as
is romance, but Jay seems to be in for lust when a film projectionist falls
in love with him. At first, it seems the lowly critic will finally get the
girl until it’s revealed she has a psychotic obsession with him that includes
tying him to her bed. She does this so he will tell her what the good movies
are. While the episode’s plot bears a resemblance to the 1990 hit film,
Misery, there are many other film parodies loaded into the episode such as
one resembling the scene where Mookie throws a trash can into Saul’s window
from the 1989 film Do The Right Thing.

Jeremy ends up saving Jay after the woman repeatedly threatens to kill him.
However, she is released from prison in Texas, where it’s apparently not
illegal to kill a film critic, and Jay wants to date her again, only because
she was willing to have sex with him.

Other disastrous relationships in the show include a non-romantic one, that
between Jay and his mother, Eleanor. She is quite the complex character in
that she is a former debutante turned society wife to Franklin Sherman. At
one point in the series, Eleanor forces her daughter Margo to be a debutante
by threatening to shoot her horse, and also reveals she is an excellent shot.
In another episode, Jay and Eleanor are interviewed on Geraldo Rivera’s show
but after she embarrasses him, he yells at her. All of New York shuns him,
more than usual. Even Vlada, the owner of the restaurant he frequents, L’Ane
Riche (which really means The Wealthy Jackass), tries to make him feel
better, while telling the waiter to serve Jay “the tainted clams.” Jay
apologizes to his mother and realizes that despite being a conniving, selfish
wretch, she is his mother that loves him.

During the show’s run, Jay continually attempts to prove he can be more than
just a critic. During the eighth episode of the series, “Marathon Mensch,”
Jay attempts to prove he can be masculine after his elderly makeup woman
Doris, played by Doris Grau, saves him from a fire on the set of his show. He
tries to run the New York Marathon and instead takes over a week to do it. At
one point during the series, Jay was fired from his job for not promoting
chewing tobacco. With no other way to make money, he decides to become a
truck driver. Jay’s unusually rock hard butt makes him a hero after he
delivers a bunch of textbooks for New York City Public Schools in under 24
hours.

Throughout the series, Jay always was striving for new heights of criticism,
even when he decided to win another Pulitzer. He was fired from his job for
the first time during this season, but bounced back after becoming the host
of the public access show “English for Cab Drivers.” The Pulitzer Prize
committee finds that all critics have sold out and there is no one doing
honest criticism anymore. However, when Jay begins a rant about how movie
studios will stop making bad movies if people stop going to bad movies, he is
celebrated throughout the film world—except by movie studio executives, who
jump out of their office windows like it’s the stock market crash of 1929.

One of the more light-hearted episodes of the show was when Doris and Jay
become friends after seeing a bad theatrical adaptation of The Hunchback of
Notre Dame. Doris and Jay spend the day together and later learn it’s
possible that Doris might be Jay’s mother in the seventh episode, which is
the only one where they get along. The first season is arguably the best
because when Jay is unhappy, this show was hilarious. Though the show has
since developed a cult following, it was cancelled after a single season,
only to find itself renewed for a second season on FOX. However, before they
would commit to it, the show would have to find a lighter tone than the
original first season. This included the addition of Alice, played by Park
Overall, who develops a relationship with Jay as the season goes on.

The show was not as bittersweet as the first season but did start relying
more on Jay’s career rather than his personal life as a source of comedy. In
the second episode of the newly revamped series, “Siskel & Ebert & Jay &
Alice,” Jay becomes the newest partner after acclaimed critics Gene Siskel
and Roger Ebert break up. Alice and Jay’s relationship took away from the
usually comedic plots centered around Jay’s unlikability to women. Another
change to the second season was a lighter animating style. During the second
season, the characters got a little shorter and things were a little brighter
for Jay. He was still tormented by his life as much as Liz Lemon, which kept
the show close to what it originally was.

Jay also became a little more modest instead of being a bit pompous and often
snarky to people. He is shown living in a smaller, less glamorous apartment
as compared to his first one which had a terrace and floor to ceiling
windows. Modesty is a quality that in the right character can make for a good
change to a series, but Jay Sherman was not that character. What the show
made up for in light-heartedness, it lost in edge as the character of Jay
Sherman was now just a regular guy. To that, I say no! The Critic showed a
man who viewed himself as the top of the heap of the film world. However, the
consistent reminder that he is the most hated person in the species made him
humble.

The changes to the show were okay, but, this was not enough to keep the show
on the air as FOX cancelled it after its second season. What became the
series finale was a clip show, which would have been suitable had the show
gotten a third season, but instead looks back on the movie parodies from the
show’s run. While a third season on another network would have been nice, all
we got are a series of brief webisodes that only featured Jay and his new
makeup woman, Jennifer. These focused more on the movie parodies than on an
actual plot, like a full episode would.

It’s a shame that The Critic had to be subject to not one but two
cancellations but it lives on through YouTube and other DVD releases. The
Critic was such a great model for later animated shows, mostly those created
by Seth MacFarlane, like Family Guy and American Dad, which rely on cutaway
gags to be funny. However, The Critic’s naturally snappy comedy and
willingness to satire Hollywood in the wackiest ways, makes it such a
memorable show. Now if there were a revival, I think that might make life
just a bit better.

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Every American should want President Trump and his administration to
handle the coronavirus epidemic effectively and successfully. Those who
seem eager to see the president fail and to call every administration
misstep a fiasco risk letting their partisanship blind them to the
demands not only of civic responsibility but of basic decency.