THE CRITIC finds new home
The Jon Lovitz animated hit is resurrected on the Web
Dateline: Thursday, August 16, 2001
By: SCOTT COLLURA By: Contributing Editor
In an inspired bit of television resurrection, the short-lived cartoon series THE CRITIC has found a new home - and a new life - as an Internet-based show on SHOCKWAVE.COM. The program, which originally aired from 1994 to 1995 first on ABC and then Fox, wasn't given much of a chance before being cancelled - despite having been the brainchild of SIMPSONS producers and writers James L. Brooks, Mike Reiss, and Al Jean.
Jon Lovitz provides the voice of the title character, a New York film critic with attitude to spare. The actor recently recalled how the show first got started, as well as how it eventually made the transition to the Web.
"I had done like four of THE SIMPSONS," said Lovitz. "[Then] Jim Brooks called me up and said, 'We want to do a live series.' So they wrote a script and then they said, 'Well, now we're going to do it animated.' I read it and I thought it was hilarious. But, it was on ABC and they would say, 'We love it, we love it.' And then after seven shows they cancelled it and it went to Fox where it was airing after THE SIMPSONS. It was actually doing really well because it held like 90% of the audience of THE SIMPSONS, which is a lot, but they cancelled it anyways. Then it was in reruns on Comedy Central. Then the whole Internet thing came up and Jim Brooks said he wanted to do it on SHOCKWAVE."
Along with Lovitz and Brooks, the original writing team of Reiss and Jean have also helped revive the show online.
"There are nine [episodes] that the two of us wrote," Jean recently explained to CINESCAPE. "And I just wrote a tenth one that's going to come out in about a month. It's been fun - the Internet animation, I think, is amazingly good. And we're proud to say we're one of the few Internet animation companies that's still going!"