| Was it a tough road getting
The Critic out on DVD?
I can't say it was. It's a funny thing. The
Critic is kind of notorious. It failed on ABC and then it
was cancelled on Fox. It's more complicated than that,
but it had this bumpy life getting on the air. But people
never gave up on this little show. It's been 23 episodes
that have been airing for 9 years on Comedy Central. That's
less than "Star Trek". They just keep showing
it. It made sense to put it on DVD.
I compare our fans to Al Quada: It's a small but
very devoted following. They put it out on DVD and it's
selling huge. People are paying for something they refuse
to watch for free.
TV on DVD is quite the rage these days.
It's a funny thing. We were doing DVD commentary
on The Simpsons - we're on our
fourth season now - and we were watching one. When
you take the commercials out - usually we're
recapping at the top of an act, which has happened before
the act ended, so it looked very funny to see these things
without the commercials sometimes. There's a lot of
repetition for no real reason.
How did the idea for The Critic
come about in the first place?
Al Jean and I had been running The Simpsons and James
Brooks wanted us to do a new show for him and he had the
idea to do a show about a makeup woman at the Today show
- it was kind of a Mary Tyler Moore thing set in the a.m.,
I guess. It really didn't grab us at all, but you really
don't say "no" to Jim Brooks.
So we were researching around all this stuff, but the only
character we really liked on the Today show was Gene Shalit.
We thought we could write about the critic and write movie
parodies and that kind of thing. And we wanted Jon Lovitz
for the part. Jim Brooks had just seen a sneak preview of
A League of Their Own and he said, "Do you like Jon
Lovitz?" And we said, "We love Jon Lovitz."
So we made this terrible mistake - we wrote the entire
Critic script around Jon Lovitz. And it was
supposed to be live-action. Then we gave it to Lovitz, and
he said, "I'm not going to do this - I'm
a movie star." It was the very last creative decision
we made to make it animated so we could work around his
schedule. I don't think any show had ever been conceived
that way. And I think the show was much, much the better
with being animated. I don't know how we would have
done the movie parodies and that kind of thing.
Was there any hesitation on your part to leave
The Simpsons?
Not on my part. When we were running the show, we were
working 90 to 100 hours a week, 51 weeks a year. There was
no time off when you run the show. It's a little easier
when you're just writing or producing the show, but the
show runner - when they said, "Do you want to do something
else?" I was like, "ANYTHING ELSE!"
It was a great release. But that's my opinion. I don't
think Al Jean ever wanted to leave The Simpsons.
We had a development deal, we did a lot of things, and after
that, he ran right back to The Simpsons. He's
been running the show beautifully for three years without
me (laughs).
The Critic started at ABC and then
went to Fox. What's the story behind the move?
Jim Brooks had a deal with ABC after he created The Simpsons.
They gave him a giant deal to create shows for ABC and anything
he brought them they had to put on the air. And this was
one of the shows we brought to ABC and they didn't want
to do it. They liked it, but they didn't want to do it.
To their credit, they really got behind the show. They gave
us their best time slot, which was right behind "Home
Improvement", and we failed. And we didn't belong on
ABC. At the time, it was a cuddly, family-friendly network.
So they brought us in to say, "Where should we put
your show on our schedule?" We looked at them blankly
and said, "We don't know."
I bear them no ill will. We thanked them for giving us
such a nice shot, but then we took the show to Fox, where
it belonged all along. They put us on after The Simpsons.
That's where we made sense. In fact, when we came on, we
had record-breaking ratings three weeks in a row. The basic
story on Fox was: The president of Fox who bought the show
was not the president of Fox when the show came on, and
the president who took over hated The Critic. Hated it.
He'd make us watch the shows with him and he'd tell us how
terrible the shows were. His assistants would be laughing
and he'd yell, "Why are you laughing at this?"
He pulled us off the air in three weeks and replaced us
with a show called House of Buggin' which is not coming
out on DVD (laughs).
Again, I hate this guy - it's a sad thing because
you only get so many times up at bat, and we were really
working. We were a genuine success at Fox, but we had the
bad luck to just run up against this guy for about six months.
How do you deal with stuff like that professionally?
It's pretty bad, but it's interesting. This is sort of
a new trend. I worked in TV for fifteen years where this
was not the case and now this is the generally the norm.
It's gotten much more complicated than, "They just
put all this crap on TV." You can put on a really successful
show and the network will still pull it off because they
didn't produce the show or the regime has changed places,
or the new regime just wants to cancel everything the old
regime did. It's not even crass anymore. It's gone from
a crass medium to a Kafka-esque one.
How did you decide what episodes to do commentary
for?
They told us to do eight, and we just took the eight best
episodes. We took ones that were turning points in the show.
I drew up my list of 8 and Al Jean drew up his list of 8,
and they were identical. There's some agreement with what
the very best ones were.
Was there anything you wanted to get on the DVD
that didn't make it on there?
We did an awful lot of badmouthing toward the president
of Fox. We named him, we said we wanted to punch him - and
all that was cut, thanks to Sony legal. If you hear any
long gaps in the DVD commentary, it's us badmouthing the
president of Fox. I wish that stuff would go on. That's
all I could get out of this thing: I want a vendetta against
this man who's never been heard from again. He was just
in TV long enough to kill my show.
I wish Jon Lovitz had come in to do some commentary. He
was in New York and I would have loved having him in. He's
so much fun. He's that guy you see on TV - he's like that
all the time.
Why couldn't he do the commentary?
He always acts like he's too big to do something. But
when we get him in to do something, we won't be able to
get rid of him. He'll talk for three hours. I think he was
out of town or running around or something.
There was one episode of The Simpsons
that Matt Groening took his name off of. Why was that?
That was Antietam at The Simpsons. That may have been
our darkest day. Jim Brooks said, "Let's do a crossover
to promote The Critic." And he had done this a million
times before with Mary Tyler Moore and Rhoda and everything.
It's a TV staple. And The Critic staff was going to write
the episode. But half of The Simpsons writers revolted.
These are all my friends, mind you. They put up an open
revolt. And we told Jim Brooks and he said, "This is
not a democracy. We're going to do it."
It was a very dark chapter: They all got paid for something
they fought against. And Matt Groening, to his integrity,
took his name off the show. And the show was very popular.
And all the Critic writers - who the Simpsons
writers hated - all got hired there when The Critic got
cancelled. It was a weird, dark, crazy moment.
So will the Simpsons ever make it to the big screen?
It's been 13 years of wanting to do The Simpsons movie.
Finally Fox said, 'Let's just do it.' We never had the greatest
idea that was compelling but Fox said, 'Maybe if we start
paying you, you'll get inspired.' And sure enough, it worked.
Will there ever be a comeback for The Critic?
They're talking about it already because the DVD is selling
really well. Even when we were alone off in the wilderness,
we'd get calls about doing a Critic movie, and if you watch
the DVD - we did thirty minutes of internet shorts. That
was a tremendous amount of work for Al Jean and myself.
We just did it at ten at night. They look pretty good, and
we did all this work and nobody saw them.
Even the most die-hard Critic fans didn't know
that here was the equivalent of two new Critic
episodes for free on the internet. That's the only reason
I'm squeamish about The Critic coming back - it's like Charlie
Brown and the football. You can't keep getting up the spirit
to keep doing The Critic.
•••
Special thanks to Irene Dean and all at Jane Ayer Public
Relations. All images copyright Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment.
All rights reserved. |
