This little gem was perhaps ahead of its time, or perhaps a bit too clever for a mass audience, lasting only a couple of seasons. Unfortunately, the premise – an eccentric but honest movie critic – doesn't age well, since the script is of course locked into the movies of the time. This little trick is what made The Critic so good, that it didn't depend on characterisation or weirdness, or weird characterisation (astronaut Homer, Peter Griffin versus a giant chicken, Roger the alien in the attic), though these aspects are of course not entirely absent – Jay has a son he worries about, a younger sister, weird WASP parents incapable of showing they love him, and so on. Its charm was more in the movies that were reviewed, usually formulaic Hollywood stinkers that allowed the writers to have a lot of fun sending up the idols du jour – Schwarzenegger, Willis, Godzilla, T-Rex. Jay's Ted Turneresque boss, who is supposed to be narcissistic, greedy and cynical, is a pussycat compared to today's more faceless moguls. The main thing is that The Critic played directly into one of pop-culture's most important traits that was still a hip novelty twenty years ago: auto-referencing, playing on meaning alternating between two levels, the overt and its subtle reference to another pop culture icon. People who are adept at the name game inevitably gain hipster status, since their ability to wink every time they drop a name means they are masters of two levels of meaning, the overt and the subtextual reference; or does it? That's the hook, one never knows what level on which pop cultural communication operates. But within the terms of this genre and this culture, The Critic stands out since it also worked within a more traditional and pre-pop culture, in its avoidance of profanity and of references to body parts and fluids that came to define "funny" 15 years later. Worth watching, especially since getting the dated movie references makes the show even more iconic for its cultish audience.
Review of The Critic
