Okay, so the last time I covered an episode of The Critic, I focussed on the series opener and my thoughts skewed heavily toward the negative. I figured I would balance that out by looking next at my favourite episode of the series, which (perhaps not so coincidentally) happens to be the Season 2 opener. "Sherman, Woman and Child" followed on from the show's ill-fated run on ABC and marked the beginning of its (equally ill-fated) second gasp at life on Fox. It first aired on March 5th 1995 (an excellent date) and received one of the most lavish (others, Matt Groening included, would say odious) welcome ceremonies conceivable in the form of a cross-over episode with The Simpsons which played right before it. If you stuck around to see what kind of adventures Jay had after he packed up and left the Springfield Film Festival, then this is what you were rewarded with.
In many respects Season 2 was the new retooled version of The Critic, with Jean and Reiss determined to learn from the mistakes they made on their initial go-round - first and foremost, how completely overboard they went in making Jay's personal life devoid of anything resembling joy or dignity. Jay was given a rounder, cuddlier look to make him more appealing (apparently his original flat-headed design was a major turn-off for viewers), but the most important change by far was the introduction of a new recurring cast member, Alice Tompkins (voice of Park Overall), who became Jay's long-term romantic interest, and finally put to rest one of Season 1's dominant running gags about the wretched state of Jay's (non-existent) love life. Good call. There is a world of difference between a character who is relatably hapless and a character whom you're effectively encouraged to look down upon - during its first season, The Critic leaned too heavily toward the latter. As I noted in my review of "Pilot", Jean and Reiss were always in a tricky position with Jay, who sees himself as above the everyman and leads a lifestyle that many would kill for, but their tactic of bringing him down to Earth, by having him cut down by the scorn of family, colleagues and public at every opportunity, gave the show an uncomfortably sour quality that I suspect alienated a whole wad of its potential viewership. Giving him a permanent girlfriend was an attempt to remedy that. And in my eyes it worked - Alice was a warmer, wiser creation than any the show had typically featured up to this point, she allowed for a little more drama and pathos, and having a character who was sincerely supportive of Jay helped to balance out the more vinegary moments. The addition of Alice was a huge step in the right direction for a series that, from the start, had so much potential but had always struggled to find its feet, although sadly it was not enough to save it from the inevitable. The series received better ratings on Fox than it had on ABC, but the current president of the network was not a fan and saw little reason to keep it afloat. The Critic only had ten more episodes to go, and one of those was a clip show. It was a sweet improvement, but short.
The episode opens with Jay at an even lower point than usual, with his ratings declining and his show at serious risk of cancellation. He finds solidarity in an unexpected source, following a chance encounter with Alice, a single mother who recently moved to New York from Knoxville, Tennessee with her daughter Penny (voice of the late Russi Taylor), having ditched her husband Cyrus (voice of Sam McMurray), an aspiring country musician who was cheating on Alice and, much like Lurleen Lumpkin, felt compelled to broadcast his indiscretions in his lyrics. Jay and Alice bond over their mutual solitude and, when Jay learns that Alice has financial issues and is threatened with eviction, helps her out by hiring her as his personal assistant. She, in turn, helps to reinvent his public image and boost his flagging ratings. But just as Jay is working up the nerve to confess his true feelings to Alice, he discovers that Cyrus has followed Alice to New York with the intent of renewing their relationship - and, to Jay's chagrin, Alice is giving serious consideration to taking him up on his offer.
I think of "Sherman, Woman and Child" as the anti-"Pilot", for it succeeds precisely where "Pilot" failed. Whereas "Pilot" was a crude exercise in nihilism that could barely conceal its disinterest in Valerie's character and her relationship with Jay, culminating in a hollow plot twist that raises more questions than it ever cares to answer, "Sherman, Woman and Child" takes time to develop the rapport between Jay and Alice, building our interest in their respective plights and ensuring that we become emotionally invested in the outcome. Unsurprisingly, the plot was taken from a suggestion by James L. Brooks, who felt that having Jay befriend an impoverished single mother would a good way to showcase his more human, compassionate side. When The Simpsons was in development, it was Brooks who advocated in favour of the series being grounded by a strong emotional undercurrent, and one of the reasons why "Sherman, Woman and Child" is my favourite installment of The Critic is because it's the episode that best works as a drama in the vein of those earlier Simpsons seasons. It still has ample helpings of the kind of wacky, random cutaway gags that were the series' speciality (among them, a particularly dark moment where Jay recalls his traumatic summer of '72), but this is definitely a more thoughtful, focussed Critic than you were used to seeing on ABC. It's not perfect by any stretch - unfortunately, it does end up showing the usual limitations of Jean and Reiss's approach to storytelling, in that it establishes a serious conflict only to settle it with rather a silly solution, but that's still leagues ahead of the forlorn non-resolution in "Pilot".
The other obvious advantage that "Sherman, Woman and Child" has over "Pilot" is that it's rid of the burden of having to introduce the full cast of characters. Even with the relocation to Fox and the knowledge that it was essentially pitching itself to a new viewership on Fox, it works on the assumption that you'll already know who all of these characters are, or else can quickly pick it up. And overall the supporting cast is used pretty sparingly throughout. Duke and Doris feature prominently throughout the first two acts, but Jeremy gets only one small scene, while Eleanor, Franklin and Ardeth
are seen only briefly in flashbacks and Marty and Margo do not appear at all. All beneficial, since it allows the focus to be where it needs to be, on Jay and Alice.
Although Jay and Alice express a mutual attraction in this episode, they would not formally become a couple until the third episode of the season, "Lady Hawke", owing to Alice's initial reservations about the wisdom of an employer/employee romance. Again, good call. I appreciate that they didn't attempt to drag it out any further than that, not just because of the severely limited time this series had remaining, but because I personally have never been too fond of protracted Will-They-Won't-They arcs. The course of true love never did run smooth, but when the writers very blatantly intend for two characters to get together, it's difficult to pull off such arcs without it looking like stalling (I could tolerate the WT/WT between Niles and Daphne in Frasier because it provided a constant and reliable source of humor, but I put the WT/WT between Fry and Leela down as the major reason why I ultimately lost interest in Futurama). On top of which, and in spite of all the gags made throughout Season 1 about Jay's total lack of charisma as a mate, he and Alice have a genuinely sweet and convincing chemistry as a couple - healthier than Homer and Marge, less heavy-handed than Fry and Leela...I'd say that this is one area where Jean and Reiss had Groening licked, but then I suppose he also had Akbar and Jeff.
What's heartening about Jay's relationship with Alice is that it starts out from a place of empathy. Jay gets close to Alice because he identifies with her rejection, and becomes interested in hiring her because he can see how her vast talents are going to waste. The script makes it clear that Jay had no aspirations of being romantically involved with her at this stage, if only because it had never occurred to him that she would reciprocate his feelings. But Alice can see the finer qualities in Jay that are lost on everyone else around him. Where "Sherman, Woman and Child" excels is that it's manages to give us a strong sense of both characters' vulnerabilities. Again, it's inevitable that Jay's luxurious lifestyle is going to make his problems seem relatively minor next to Alice's - even at the risk of losing his job he's presumably going to be quite comfortably off by comparison. This is something the script is seemingly well aware of, for there is a bit where Jay reaches out for sympathy from his cab driver, who rebuffs (although possibly not in a language that Jay can understand) that he lives in an apartment with twenty-seven other people. Nevertheless, it's followed up by an affecting moment that, for as absurdly executed as it may be, with Jay looking down to the day's headlines and seeing only aggressive diatribes staring him in the face, really hammers home just how longing he is for a little friendly human company. It's helped by strong performances from all key players. Overall is especially wonderful as Alice - she brings a delightful spunkiness but also an underlying sadness to the character. Lovitz plays Jay with the usual pipsqueak extravagance but is fully capable of an authentic sensitivity where the story demands it, while McMurray portrays Cyrus with a casual, borderline oblivious brashness that makes him both fun and insidious. The drama is also balanced out by a typically sharp script - standout gags include Jay's manic depressive schedule (he has a bulimia one in another episode), Duke's infatuation with the Country Bear Jamboree he apparently has squirrelled away in his office, and Jeremy's questionable use of Latin (see below). The only gag that falls particularly flat concerns a guest spot by a foul-mouthed Madonna on Humphrey The Hippo (the show's analogue to Barney The Dinosaur).
As I say, the episode does end up highlighting Jean and Reiss's usual limitations as we reach the third act. Depth of narrative was never their strong point, either here or on The Simpsons, and "Sherman, Woman and Child" suffers from much the same fudging of central problems within its climax. The arc regarding Jay's professional woes receives a glib wrap-up before we even get that far (in which Jay becomes more amenable to emphasising style over substance), but then I doubt that anyone was ever too flustered about that outcome. The greater issue is that Alice's dilemma, for as serious as the stakes are, isn't particularly well-developed, opting for a facile resolution that doesn't quite bear the weight of its build-up. This feels especially salient during the sequence where Jay quizzes Alice as to why she feels so tempted to return to Cyrus:
Alice: Alright, I've got this weakness, okay. I know Cyrus is completely wrong for me, but every time I'm about to kick him out, he sings to me.
Jay: And?
Alice: And I melt like butter on a bagel...God, I've been in New York too long.
I think that one exchange encapsulates perfectly the major strengths and weaknesses of this series. On the one hand, Alice's "God, I've been in New York too long" is hilarious, and Overall's delivery is terrific. At the same time, that is ultimately a really flimsy rationale on which to hang our final conflict. Alice is reluctant to break things off with Cyrus because his singing is too great a turn-on for her? "Sherman, Woman and Child" might represent the absolute peak of Jean and Reiss's dramatic flair (at least within The Critic) but clearly there was only so seriously they were willing to take this scenario. People remain in unhealthy relationships all the time in real life, and I can think of a number of more compelling reasons why Alice might be tempted to go back to Cyrus - fear of being unable to make it on her own, guilt over their having a child together, pressure from extended family members, etc. As it is, there's a strange incongruity throughout this entire sequence, with Overall's performance being so powerful and sincere, and her imbuing the character with such a harrowing vulnerability (of particular clout is the jaded resignation in her line, "Haven't you ever been in a situation that was bad for you but at the same time you couldn't leave?"), and yet what she's actually confiding to Jay just seems so trivial and silly. I do wish that the episode had been willing to go the extra mile and develop Alice's dilemma into the marginally more complex one that her narrative and characterisation up until now had warranted. Instead, a shallow conflict begets a ludicrous confrontation, with Jay attempting to counter Cyrus's singing by showing up at Alice's apartment with an accordion in hand and his own lyrics imploring her to decide what's truly best for herself. Well, you have to admire Jay's fighting spirit, and he does get one particularly good line out of it ("I've lost my ability to tell between what's cute and what's idiotic"), but it definitely feels like it was conceived more with the yucks in mind than anything too stark or sincere on the emotional front (although there is some sweetness in Jay's admission that he doesn't know if things could ever work out between himself and Alice, he would just hate to see her return to a relationship that makes her so unhappy). I like the idea of Jay supporting Alice by appealing to her self-belief ("Your potential is what's essential"), but then self-doubt was never really shown to be the key issue for her. Regardless, the gambit works - Jay's encouragement gives Alice the willpower to ask Cyrus to leave her for good, and the episode ends with her suggesting to Jay that perhaps one day she might be ready to see him as more than a friend.
For the "What Could Have Been" files, Jean and Reiss state on the DVD commentary that they had plans for Cyrus to become a semi-regular character, but the series didn't hold out long enough for him to return. Apparently, there were nine further scripts that went unproduced, including one where Jay went to Nashville and became a music critic, which I presume would have been the episode where Cyrus reappeared. Another reportedly involved Marty in a Quiz Show-esque scandal. Personally, I would have liked to have seen an Ardeth-focussed episode, as she never received any development beyond being Jay's embittered ex-wife (added to which, I don't think we ever met her new man Alberto). I would also hope that had the series continued then the issue of Jay's biological parentage (and Doris's long-lost child) would have been raised again. Oh, the possibilities. What's important, though, is that the matter of Jay and Alice's relationship was addressed within the time we had, clearing all obstacles and enabling them to get together and live happily ever after.
...or not. Regrettably, there is an epilogue to the Jay/Alice story that came about a few years later, when The Critic was revived, briefly, in 2000 for a series of flash animated internet shorts (or "webisodes") and Alice was nowhere to be seen. She wasn't alone in that regard - besides Jay himself, Vlada was the only character from the TV series to return in the webisodes, and even then only for a single scene (in part, I'm sure this was due to complications in bringing the full voice cast back, although Maurice La Marche was still there, so I'm not sure why we couldn't at least have had Jeremy). However, and much to the heartbreak of Jay/Alice shippers everywhere, there was a line of dialogue in the first webisode that seemed to have been slipped in specifically to account for Alice's absence - when Jennifer, Jay's current make-up lady, asks Jay what happened to his self-esteem, he responds, "I lost it in the second divorce settlement." It doesn't take a whole lot of reading in between the lines to conclude that Jay and Alice were married but that it ended just as bitterly as his marriage to Ardeth. Some viewers contend that we don't know for certain that Jay was referring to Alice, as technically Jay did have another spouse in between Ardeth and Alice - in the Season 1 episode "Marty's First Date", he marries a Mexican airport employee in order to gain entry into Cuba, and she swiftly announces her intention to divorce him and take half his money. Sorry, and I do wish this wasn't the case, but I believe that Jay was indeed meant to be talking about Alice in that scene. For one, Jay's wife from "Marty's First Date" was never mentioned again after that episode, and why should she be? She was only ever a dumb plot device, and as such, I doubt that we were expected to have her high in our minds when Jay brings up his second divorce. Not least because it's also followed by another, equally enigmatic statement: "Still, it was all my fault..." That line, and Jay's obvious dejection in admitting it, seem purposely designed to prod at some glaring gap in our knowledge - evidently, something happened to sour the relationship between Jay and his established partner, but we're not going to find out what. Likewise, whereas Jay expressed no hard feelings or regrets about his Mexican bride's position in "Marty's First Date" (after all, he was using her, too), here he clearly has been hurt by the outcome. So I suspect it was included as a reset button enabling us to get back to square one and shed all of the character's existing baggage, so that Jay could once again be single, desperate and constantly angling to fuck Jennifer. And the mere fact that Jay had moved onto Jennifer suggests that one way or another, things did not work out between himself and Alice. I don't blame the shippers for being upset about it - a lot went into building Jay and Alice's relationship across the second season, so for it to be hand-waved so flippantly and off of screen definitely feels like a cheap move. But then if it really bothers you, I suppose you're under no obligation to regard the webisodes as canon. They had their moments ("Pikachu, I understand in your most recent film you fired the director, Paul Verhoeven") but tonally and formally, they definitely feel more like a minor offshoot than a legitimate continuation of the series.
The story in "Sherman, Woman and Child" is engaging enough that the movie parodies end up being largely overshadowed, but there is one highlight in the form of a spoof of The Nightmare Before Christmas (misleadingly billed as a Tim Burton movie) that's animated in some pretty slick-looking stop-motion (courtesy of L.H. MacMullan and Olive Jar Animation). Elsewhere have parodies of A Few Good Men (this was from around the time that comparisons were being drawn between Jack Nicholson's acting style and Christian Slater's, and apparently also William Devane), Forrest Gump (hate the movie, but the parody's tolerable), Dennis The Menace and Scent of A Woman, in what I believe may have been already the third time that the series had parodied that specific movie. This is worth flagging up, as I think another issue The Critic had is that it was always fairly limited in the scope of the movies it was willing to lampoon, and there were certain pictures they kept returning to again and again, most obviously Scent of A Woman and Rain Man. I'm going to assume that their fascination with those two in particular lay in their amusement at the way Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman's characters talk in their respective roles. Scent of A Woman was at least a relatively contemporary reference, but I'd have thought that Rain Man gags would have been considered a bit old hat by the mid-90s. Nevertheless, they couldn't get over it. Every time Tom Cruise came up, you knew a Hoffman reference wasn't far behind.
The formalities:
- The Call: Pharmacist - "Jay, this is your pharmacist. Instead of hair restore we've accidentally sent you Preparation H."
- The Movie: The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965). This parodies the opening scene where the camera zooms in on Julie Andrews performing "The hills are alive with the sound of music" in a beautiful alpine meadow. In this case, the camera zooms in too far on Andrews and knocks her down those lively hills.
Quote of the episode: Jeremy - "In the words of the poet, Carpe Canem!"
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