AFOS Blog Rewind: Not everyone's a critic, which was why Fox's enormously funny The Critic didn't last

Last week, Uproxx posted a lengthy and enjoyable interview with longtime writing partners Al Jean and Mike Reiss about their short-lived but well-remembered creation, the '90s animated show The Critic. The show centered around Jay Sherman, a persnickety film critic nobody likes, except for Marty, Jay's 13-year-old son, and Margo, Jay's teenage foster sister, who both look up to Jay, and Jeremy Hawke, an easygoing Aussie B-movie star who considers Jay his best friend ever since he was the only critic who didn't trash his first movie. In the Uproxx article, Jean and Reiss recalled the main reason why The Critic lasted from only 1993 to 1995 (the new Fox network president at the time hated it) and the challenges of attempting to give Jay and the other Critic characters the same kind of revival Family Guy and Futurama experienced after they were cancelled by Fox too (three of The Critic's regular voice actors are no longer alive, and Reiss also points out that "Siskel and Ebert are dead and those kinds of shows don't exist anymore. Movie critics used to be all over TV and they used to wield great influence and they just don't"). So from March 18, 2008, here's a post about The Critic, originally posted under the title "'Now who wants to boogie with Baby '37?'"

This weekend, I was surprised to find an eight-hour ReelzChannel marathon of the short-lived animated series The Critic, James L. Brooks' second foray into animation after the success of The Simpsons. Created by Simpsons writers Al Jean and Mike Reiss, The Critic aired on ABC during its first season (1993-94) and then for its second and final season (1994-95), it went to die on Fox (where the show's "Hey! We're on Fox" gags were amusing, while on a non-Fox channel in reruns years later, uh... not so much). The show, which comes complete with Simpsonian catchphrases that never took off ("It stinks!," "Hotchie motchie!," the Chuck McCann-referencing "Hi guy!"), later enjoyed a cultish afterlife in webisode form and on both DVD and Comedy Central's animation lineup.

Tribeca: Jimmy J. Aquino's Lacuna Matata, Part 1

This is the first in a series of posts I'm calling "Lacuna Matata," in which I attempt to preserve the fading memory of TV shows (or in some cases, comic books) that no one except me remembers watching because the networks somehow Lacuna'd these things from everyone's noggins.

Buried somewhere in my old VHS collection at my parents' house is a tape in shabby condition that contains the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles episode that guest-starred Harrison Ford and the first two episodes of Tribeca, a pretty good, rarely seen 1993 anthology series that was filmed on location in New York and lasted only seven weeks on Fox.

A decade before Robert De Niro and his Tribeca Productions business partner Jane Rosenthal co-founded the Tribeca Film Festival, the two producers used the Lower Manhattan neighborhood as the setting for what was essentially a throwback to the highbrow '50s and '60s TV dramas that were made during "a time when socially-conscious New Yorkers ruled the airwaves," as Maclean's' Jaime J. Weinman describes the New York-centric early years of scripted TV. That somber, East Side/West Side-esque approach meant this anthology drama, which focused on a different Tribeca resident or two each week, fit right in on the Simpsons and Married... with Children network's schedule about as well as Carrie Prejean at an opposite couples pride parade.

There are two things I saw while growing up that made me think to myself, "Wow, despite the cockroaches and occasional muggers, New York ain't such a bad place after all and I want to move there someday": Ghostbusters and Fox's Tribeca. The show also gave me my first glimpse of Kevin Spacey, who guest-starred as a suicidal singer/songwriter--and got to show off his singing voice--in an episode that reunited him with Tribeca showrunner David J. Burke, who previously co-created the classic Wiseguy arc that gave Spacey his big break. Burke's taste for downbeat, untidy endings--a frequent element of his writing on Wiseguy--also gave Tribeca at the time a certain edge over network dramas not called Homicide.

Though it was an anthology show, Tribeca had a two-man regular cast (Philip Bosco as a kindly coffeehouse owner and Joe Morton as an equally kindly patrolman who looked like he came from Law & Order: Mounted Police Unit) and some nice bits of continuity (a character like a homeless war vet played by Stephen Lang would briefly appear one week and then turn up as the main character the following week). Like many other anthologies, Tribeca didn't always hit one out the park, but when it did, it was network TV at its best. The series' strongest episode was the first one, "The Box," which featured a standout Emmy-winning performance by a fresh-off-Boyz N the Hood Laurence Fishburne as a plainclothes cop who's obsessed with both finding the mugger who killed his stockbroker brother (Carl Lumbly) and opening a puzzle box that his brother gave to him before he died.

With its all-black guest cast, "The Box" is also a great 45-minute argument for the need for more network drama series with casts that consist mostly of actors of color. It's a shame that the five networks have been willing to take a chance on all-black sitcoms but not all-black dramas, possibly because of the low ratings of past dramas like Avery Brooks' A Man Called Hawk, James Earl Jones' Under One Roof and Blair Underwood's City of Angels. Sixteen years after its initial broadcast, "The Box" is sadly, still a rarity rather than the norm.

I remember seeing the reclusive De Niro make a surprise appearance in a Fox promo a la John Wayne's 1955 Gunsmoke series premiere intro to get Fox viewers to tune in to his show. No such luck. One other thing I remember about Tribeca was its cool opening and closing theme, an instrumental version of "Keep It Goin'," a James Brown-sampling 1992 track by largely forgotten alt-rap artist and A.V. Club "Least Essential Albums of the '90s" nominee Me Phi Me.

Tribeca is such an obscure series that there are no YouTube clips or .jpgs from the series online (the only pictures that turn up in Google image searches for Tribeca are pics of either De Niro or the neighborhood skyline). So as you listen to the Me Phi Me tune (that is if you can find it online), just stare at the photo of the Tribeca skyline at the top of this post, and you'll get a pretty accurate recreation of the Tribeca opening titles, which consisted of nothing but whip pans across the Tribeca streets and skyline. If you want to see whip pans, just hit yourself in the head with a skillet.

New AFOS episode: "The Inmates Are Taking Over the Asylum"

This week, the United Artists 90th Anniversary Film Festival hits both the Castro Theatre in San Francisco and the Nuart Theatre in L.A., so the next episode of A Fistful of Soundtracks will feature my favorite selections from scores to films that were distributed by UA. "The studio without a studio" thrived during an era when rival studios couldn't keep up with their audiences--and the social changes of the period--and kept releasing dull and staid product. UA's smart and daring films during the Arthur Krim/Robert Benjamin regime and Krim and Benjamin's championing of filmmakers--they let them do their thing--are always worth celebrating. Oh yeah, and most of these flicks had terrific original music too.

"The Inmates Are Taking Over the Asylum" (WEB96) will begin streaming tomorrow (Thursday, May 1 at midnight, 4am, 10am, 3pm, 7pm and 11pm). I've included themes from some of UA's most popular releases (The Great Escape, 007), but I also wanted to fill most of the episode with music from cult classics (The Taking of Pelham One Two Three) or soundtrack albums that are out of print (The Long Goodbye).

Pelham, a thrilling caper movie with Walter Matthau at his sardonic best as a cynical transit cop who's the perfect disheveled hero for an even more disheveled New York, and The Long Goodbye, Robert Altman's clever reimagining of Philip Marlowe, are two '70s UA flicks I instantly fell in love with. I first caught Pelham on TCM a few years ago and discovered The Long Goodbye on DVD last year.

Pelham composer David Shire and Long Goodbye composer John Williams achieved so much with what little they had. Shire wrote each Pelham score cue under the 12-tone method of composition to evoke "organized chaos"--in other words, the funkiest film score not written by a black dude ever.

Williams' Long Goodbye score--one of the shortest he ever wrote--is equally off-kilter. It consists of nothing but different variations on the same melody. Wherever Elliott Gould's Marlowe goes, the Long Goodbye theme follows, whether it's as bar piano music or as a doorbell ring. I don't know exactly why Altman asked Williams to write the score like that. (Jaime J. Weinman says Williams' score is a spoof of the incessant pimping of movie title songs in the '60s and '70s--an issue that caused the previously stable working relationship between Alfred Hitchcock and the less pop-minded Bernard Herrmann to fall apart during the making of Torn Curtain. The Something Old, Nothing New blogger theorizes that Williams' score could also be an homage to Roy Webb's similarly structured score during Out of the Past.) But whatever the intentions were, the Long Goodbye score nicely reflects Marlowe's sense of displacement--he's a '40s guy in a '70s world.

Whereas UA was a '70s studio in a '50s Hollywood that struggled to keep up with the '60s.

Roman Coppola's CQ

WEB96 also covers UA's recent art-house phase, before Tom Cruise took over the company. One of my favorite films to emerge from UA's art-house years is Roman Coppola's CQ, a fun little film about filmmaking in the mold of Day for Night and Ed Wood. It contains a great loungey score by the French trio Mellow, which evoked the likes of Piero Umiliani, Piero Piccioni and Ennio Morricone during the cues for the movie-within-the-movie Codename: Dragonfly, a mash-up of Barbarella and Danger: Diabolik (the source of Angela Lindvall's sexy rolling-around-in-cash scene).

The '70s logo

A Half-Assed History of UA's Logos

I remember the first appearance of the '90s UA logo when I saw GoldenEye in 1995. The logo actually received cheers from GoldenEye's opening weekend audience--they were just so happy to see Bond again after a six-year absence.

The '90s logo

The sadly discontinued jingle was composed by Jeff Eden Fair and Starr Parodi.

The husband-and-wife duo recalled to SoundtrackNet that "We did that with a 90-piece orchestra at the Sony Scoring Stage... Our instructions were, 'We want something that represents the past, present, and future of United Artists.' So we started with classic orchestral instrumentation, moving to futuristic sounds and concepts at the end."

The '00s logo

Defamer's funny idea of what the UA watertower now looks like

Next AFOS episode: I'm taking a break after five consecutive eps. I don't know when I'll stream the next new ep.

"Now who wants to boogie with Baby '37?"

This weekend, I was surprised to find an eight-hour ReelzChannel marathon of the short-lived animated series The Critic, James L. Brooks' second foray into animation after the success of The Simpsons. Created by Simpsons writers Al Jean and Mike Reiss, The Critic aired on ABC during its first season (1993-94) and then for its second and final season (1994-95), it went to die on Fox (where the show's "Hey! We're on Fox" gags were amusing, while on a non-Fox channel in reruns years later, uh... not so much). The show, which comes complete with Simpsonian catchphrases that never took off ("It stinks!," "Hotchie motchie!," the Chuck McCann-referencing "Hi guy!"), later enjoyed a cultish afterlife in webisode form and on both DVD and Comedy Central's animation lineup.

The ReelzChannel marathon reminded me how funny The Critic could be, though the rest of America didn't agree, including TV critics who found it difficult to warm up to the show like they had with The Simpsons. Even Matt Groening, Jean and Reiss' on-and-off-and-on-again boss, had gripes about The Critic. (The Simpsons creator opposed Brooks' idea of a Simpsons/Critic crossover show and took his name off the credits of that episode. Some of Groening's gripes are understandable. The crossover added more continuity errors to a series that was already drowning in them--in the Critic universe, the Simpsons characters were established as fictional.)

The titular loser is Jay Sherman (Jon Lovitz), the miserable host of a Manhattan-based movie review show that's constantly being tinkered with by cable network CEO Duke Phillips (Charles Napier), a Ted Turner-like chicken and waffle house magnate. While getting reacquainted with The Critic, I was struck by how the love/hate relationship between Jay and his intrusive boss seems to have been carried over in the dynamic between Liz the principled comedy writer and Jack the well-meaning but meddlesome network exec on 30 Rock (and like Duke, Jack thinks his favorite employee is gay). The big difference between Jay/Duke and Liz/Jack is that most of Jack's ideas have actually helped Liz's program The Girlie Show (Jack's hiring of movie star Tracy Jordan boosts the ratings of the rebranded TGS), while none of Duke's ideas have ever worked (one of my favorite Critic episodes--also the source of the classic Franklin Sherman line that I referenced in this post's title--involves Duke's insistence on pairing Jay with sidekicks, which range from a grizzly bear to a sassy black kid named "Lil' Shabazz").

Though it was given great time slots by both networks (ABC paired it with Home Improvement, while on Fox, it followed The Simpsons), why wasn't The Critic able to attract viewers like The Simpsons and King of the Hill did? There's a theory in a post by Jaime J. Weinman that could explain The Critic's inability to find an audience. He thinks 30 Rock is a ratings underperformer because it suffers from the same flaw that he says is also plaguing How I Met Your Mother: the central character, the one figure that the audience is supposed to identify with, is the show's weak link. (Weinman feels Liz and Ted, the "I" in How I Met Your Mother, lack presence as central characters--they're constantly overshadowed by the other characters on their respective shows--and the less patient viewers have abandoned these shows because they can't find any characteristics in the leads that they could relate to.) While I don't consider the characters of Liz or Ted to be the weak links (for me, the weak link on these ratings-addled cult shows has often been the stunt casting), I could see why Jay's irritable film critic persona could be off-putting to viewers because you know how much America loves film critics.

I also think The Critic failed to connect with viewers because of its offbeat cosmopolitan setting, which, for me, was one of the show's charms. The setting was reflected in everything from Hans Zimmer's sprightly, "Rhapsody in Blue"-inspired main title theme (an early taste of what was to come in his surprisingly enjoyable Simpsons Movie score) to the character design, a shout-out to the drawing styles of New York cartoonists like Al Hirschfeld and the New Yorker illustrators. Viewers tend to embrace animated sitcoms set in suburban neighborhoods (The Simpsons, King of the Hill, South Park, Family Guy) and avoid cartoons set in the city (The Critic, Futurama, The PJs), perhaps because the characters on these city shows have been too abrasive for their tastes, and Jay was no exception.

Here's another Weinman theory: viewers avoid darker-toned sitcoms (The Honeymooners and Brooks' own Taxi were ratings flops during their initial runs). The Critic was far from dark, but my God, Jay the adopted, divorced and luckless schlub suffered through life more often than Charlie Brown--even though he seemed to get as much tail as George Costanza.

Too bad viewers bolted because they couldn't stomach seeing those brash qualities in a prime-time cartoon. They missed out on other great elements of The Critic, like any gag involving the show's funniest character, Jay's WASPy adoptive father Franklin (Gerrit Graham), a former New York governor whose main vice while in office seemed to be cocktails rather than whores. Had The Critic continued for more than 23 episodes, I would have loved to have seen what else the writers had in store for the insane and eternally tipsy Franklin, who, like Ralph Wiggum on The Simpsons and Tracy on 30 Rock, lives in "a different and more wonderful universe than everyone around him," as the A.V. Club's Nathan Rabin once wrote about Ralph and Franklin. A couple of the secondary settings in Jay's fully realized universe could have functioned well as separate shows of their own, like the mansion where Jay's adoptive family lives or his son Marty's U.N. private school, where the kid from Easter Island can't catch a break and the African headmaster creepily laughs at his own jokes.

There was clearly more to the show than just the movie/TV/pop culture parody gags, some of which haven't aged well, while others are amazingly dead-on, like a sequence involving a musical version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame--this was two years before Disney released its animated song-and-dance version of Hunchback. (Speaking of which, the random movie/TV spoofs make more sense in the showbiz setting of The Critic than they do in the non-showbiz setting of Family Guy. My favorite Critic parody is a 007-style depiction of Fifth President James Monroe, who spits game at a damsel in distress with a Connery-esque "Welcome to the Era of Good Feelingsch.")

Critics who couldn't warm up to The Critic because they felt it lacked the heart of the earlier seasons of The Simpsons must have missed the poignant "Every Doris Has Her Day," the most Brooksian of all the Critic episodes (Brooks is credited with providing many of The Simpsons' more emotional moments). In that episode, Jay discovers a kindred spirit in his previously unfriendly, chain-smoking makeup artist Doris (the late Doris Grau, who also voiced Lunch Lady Doris on The Simpsons) and begins to think she's his birth mother. But to Jay's disappointment, DNA results prove otherwise. Now that's one juicy thread the Critic writers could have pursued if Fox hadn't killed the series: would Jay ever find his birth parents?

The series could have lasted longer had it been produced for a cable channel like IFC, which would have understood The Critic because IFC's specialty is original programming that satirizes showbiz (Greg the Bunny, The Minor Accomplishments of Jackie Woodman), and its audience consists primarily of Jay Sherman types. The Critic just had the misfortune of airing on a network that found it too crass and a network that found it too tame.

And that stinks.

Boogie with Baby '37 when The Critic airs Mondays at 6:30pm ET/3:30pm PT, 8:30pm ET/5:30pm PT and 11:30pm ET/8:30pm PT on ReelzChannel. Most DVR-worthy Critic episode: the break-up of Siskel and Ebert (who voiced themselves).

Simpson Tide

SoundtrackNet has posted an early review of Hans Zimmer's Simpsons Movie score. The reviewer says the score is one of the year's most enjoyable ones. Though I can't wait to hear Danny Elfman's opening theme reinterpreted by an orchestra much bigger than the one that performs the music on the show, it's a bit disappointing that TV show score veteran Alf Clausen, the series' clever musical director, got passed over for the Crimson Tide composer, whom producer James L. Brooks has relied on for his film projects. (Some of the NoHomers.net fans are especially pissed.)

Maclean's staff writer and blogger Jaime J. Weinman wonders if there's any validity to the notion that a composer with more film experience like Zimmer is better suited for The Simpsons Movie than Clausen, who's worked more often for TV:

Is it right to assume that a feature film needs someone with "feature experience"? With movies based on TV shows, the truth may be the other way around. Sometimes movie composers can't match the style of the original series; the movie version of Mission: Impossible wrecked the famous theme song by arranging it in the wrong time signature. How Zimmer will do on the Simpsons movie remains to be seen, but his music may not sound Simpsons-esque, because Clausen's music has already defined what's right for the characters and the setting.

But The Simpsons Movie has a problem that most movies don't: its characters are in syndication several times a day. The use of a big-name movie composer may be a way of giving audiences something they can't get for free in syndication.

Weinman is referring to U2 members Larry Mullen and Adam Clayton and their much-maligned end credits version of Lalo Schifrin's Mission: Impossible theme in a 4/4 beat instead of Schifrin's original 5/4, not Danny Elfman's version of the theme, which was faithful to the original. Elfman's score is one of the best scores from a feature film based on a TV show because he paid tribute to Schifrin's jazzy music, which was like a sixth character on the old show (Elfman even brought back Schifrin's bongoes), and he did so without sacrificing his own style.

One fact about Zimmer that Weinman overlooked is that in 2000, Zimmer wrote the score to the extreme sports-ish sequel Mission: Impossible 2. Unlike Elfman, Zimmer mangled Schifrin's timeless theme in a nu metal version that's aged badly, one of the few missteps in Zimmer's career. I can't hear Zimmer's nu metal Mission: Impossible 2 theme without thinking of the "Extreme!" dorks from Harold & Kumar.

Zimmer may have wrecked the Mission: Impossible theme seven years ago, but I think it's unlikely that he's bungled this new assignment. Unlike all those Comic Book Guys out there who have already formed their opinions on the Simpsons fan forums without hearing a single note of the score, I'm a wait-and-see guy (or rather, wait-and-hear guy), so I'll say what I think of this score after I see the movie. The fact that Zimmer wrote a large-scale choral rendition of Homer's "Spider-Pig" theme may be a sign that he gets The Simpsons.