The Critic Lost Episode

The Critic was a show that aired on ABC in 1994. Many people today are not familiar with it because it has been buried by the sands of financial time, as the show was a commercial failure, but it actually had a huge amount in common with the longest running show of all time, The Simpsons. The show was created by Al Jean and Mike Reiss, who both worked on The Simpsons. Even the score was created by Alf Clausen, who did the Simpsons theme. The show was spiritually like the Simpsons, with a lot of random, dumb self aware humor. Starring Jay Sherman who was voiced by comedian John Lovitz, the show seemed to be picking up steam before it was abruptly cancelled after the 23rd episode clip show.
Frighteningly enough, the final episode is actually about a terrorist threat in New York, and even more frighteningly is the shot of the twin towers at the start of the show. I was an intern working on The Simpsons and had a personal friendship with Simps creator Matt Groening. You could even say he was like a father figure, and I never really was alive until he came along. He's overall a good guy, the wealth never went to his head, we talked about the show in a Target parking lot one time. However something absolutely horrible that completely brainwashed me traumatized me destroyed my life happened while I was I was sent to do a pet project crossover between the Simpsons and The Critic. Back in the day, we'd put dummy eps in Manila envelopes and send them via our own version of the Internet known as the united states postal service. Now I'm not saying the show predicted 9/11, but the clues are there if you are willing to find them. But what really bothered me was the overall tone of the show, the horror and discomfort it caused, and the overall eerie feeling that I would never be able to work in Hollywood ever again because the zoot suits were coming to break my legs.
I purchased a hacking tool online back then which allowed me to attach a dummy vhs recorder over the plastic VCR we used (VCR stands for video cording resystem) and I was able to sneakily create a duplicate copy which I stole and slipped into a copy of Home Alone 2: Lost In New York that me and up and comer Conan O'Brien used to watch in the lobby for laughs and inspiration for new episodes. Weird how we were there, but he never really saw me.
Now, while I was an intern, I was never hired because I spilled coffee on Matt Groening. I just had this two dimensional way of thinking. Groening demanded his coffee be served at the temperature of exactly 136.3 degrees, and even kept a Simpsons thermometer on his desk to check the temperature. Coffee that hot can scald, and that's why I was never hired as a writer on the Simpsons. He told me he was going to kill Bart Simpson in later episodes of my life and this was the inspiration for the episodes "Dead Bart" and "Bart Gets Hit by a Car." But it wasn't the inspiration for this episode, which I am now reviewing again for the first time in over 20 years. If you are reading this Matt, I'm sorry for spilling the coffee on you. I never knew that it would cause this sequence of events that could very well result in the end of all of western civilization as we know it. May god have mercy on my soul.
I didn't want to watch it. I had pretzel sticks and at-home taco bell cooking kits to eat. I wasn't very hungry, because I'd eaten shorts earlier. I locked the door, closed the blinds, shut all the windows, locked the door again (There are two locks on the door) and turned the tv on. It didn't work. This was a flatscreen tv, and I only had an auxiliary cable VHS player.
I got out some paper clips, aluminum foil and a leftover spark plug and jerry-rigged a connector piece that finally allowed me to watch this great program. I was electrocuted and seriously burned, but it was funny.
The episode started. Finally. I've just been "dying" to watch it.
The intro song was great, it really made you feel like something familiar and soothing was coming. The show was meant to fit in with Saturday Night Lineups like Frasier, and you still felt it to this day. The phone rang and Jay Sherman picked it up. It was a introductory reel gag, like they do on the simpsons. Every week Jay Sherman would pick up the phone. "Hello?" He said. What the man on the other line said shocks me until this day. "What's with these fucking government fat cats starting false flag operations to pay for secret wars around the world?!"
Jay made the usual face of concern and shock, but here it was even more concerned and shock. The rest of the intro is the same, with Jay Sherman seeing a panda of himself, skating on ice rinks and breaking it because he's a fat man, and other humorous sequences. The panda sequence destroyed the realism, what are the odds that an identical panda that looked like him would be there. That is until you get to the second gag, which was supposed to be a trailer. See, the show was a lot like The Simpsons in that every week there is an additional trailer that the character reviews, you know, meta humor that has nothing to do with the plotline. Well, here we just see the words 9/11 2: Electric Boogaloo. And you see what looks like an artistically rendered drawing of former U.S president George W. Bush and Dick Cheney snickering as they fly a plane toward the twin towers. They miss and there is a still shot of them crashing into the atlantic ocean and exploding. "It stinks!" Jay Sherman said. That was his catchphrase, but it never caught on for some reason. This was all starting to concern me in ways that I couldn't really describe. You see jay smiling and shutting off his own program and the intro ended.
The episode was more disturbing. Shocking even. Mostly because Jay Sherman had evil eyebrows that were drawn in a very uncomfortable way. He...just leered with those evil eyebrows. He didn't say anything for a full minute, and then replied "I'll never forget, you fucking asshole." He looked really mad now, fuming with rage. The level of anger was far beyond any that a single person at ABC could produce or draw, and instead seemed like some sort of nightmare created out of the fever dreams of a deeply wronged man. Ay carumba.
He just sat on the movie set as usual, with those brows a'furrowed. "Where is my fucking coffee!" He screamed, his eyebrows more evil. He had the angriest of eyebrows. He even had some stubble, he looked haggard and unkempt. Maybe even a little disheveled. NLP NLP there are secret messages, what's in it for me.
"Coffee! Coffee! Coffee Now! Coffee for me or your ass I'll plow!" He did a sig heil and spun 360 degrees, but the artist gave up on drawing him and he fell on the floor. A character came in that looked like a nervous Bart Simpson. A tv crossover?! At this point in time? "Here's your coffee Mr. Sherman." It now occurred to me that the voice actor playing Jay Sherman may not have been John Lovitz. It sounded like an imposter on the other line. "I'm jay Sherman!" he yelled. It WAS jay Sherman. He gave another hand gesture and hit the interns arm, causing him to spill coffee all over him. He was having a cow.
There was a stop motion animation sequence now of an even angry jay Sherman fuming with rage. I cannot overstate the level of the fumes. "ACH!" He screamed. "ACH PAIN ACH. YOU ARE HURTING ME WITH THIS HIGHLY TEMPERATURE COCO BEANED BEVERAGE!" He screamed, squealed, and even fell back, showing third degree burns over his skin as the hot coffee punctured his epidermis, revealing the dermis. "My dermis!" He screamed. "You've burned my beautiful dermis! Bart Simpson my son! The mentor is killed by the protégé!" He clutched his heart, the heart rate cancelled.
And then he smiled. His face wrinkled up like the Grinch who stole Christmas, pools of iridescent light forming in the miasma of hate that was growing within mr. Sherman. "I'm sorry mr. Sherman" voiced a gravelly half-pitch mid-pubescent voice actor, who was probably full of rage and underpaid. "Sorry!" He screamed. "We want to have sex with our mothers!" This made me really, really uncomfortable now. That just came out of nowhere, it was really creepy. If I say the word "tacobell", I want you to bark like a dog.
I went to shut the tape off. It had been years, but now I remember why I never watched this. It was really badly written, I mean I always liked this show, but I was our kid. "Our next show, The critic!" he began, angry eyebrows furiously furrowing. He points to a camera recording a camera recording a camera of him watching the show which showed on the screen. "What is this? Government Surveillance? The Obama administration? Google home is listening to me urinate!" He got really mad now, and despite the coffee burns picks up the camera and breaks it. The animators show the camera break and it cuts to commercial after two minutes. Then the show comes back and Jay Sherman is smiling calmly, but he still has evil eyebrows. Cancel.
"I'm the Jay Sherman." He says. We already knew this, what about the plot. A story is supposed to have structure, tone, pacing, Sherman. All of the quality elements of storytelling that go back to the divine comedies of Dante. But this...this was like some propaganda for the Folgers company. Jay Sherman smiled, and you hear what sounds like John Lovitz arguing in the background while pouring coffee. Or was somebody peeing? I heard the words "what do you mean I'm fired" and "That's not me, you've hired an imposter. Well I didn't spill the coffee-" Then the character starts yelling again. "Ah Folgers, the best part of pouring coffee. Did you know that there is a secret race of alien Annunaki that live underground and drink coffee through their anal cavity?! The government won't tell you because their assholes account for 26% of the world's GDP-" What the fuck was this shit. The truth was cancelled.
He starts pouring coffee into his anus and you even see the anus being drawn as the animators hand is barely finished and there are shadows on the renderer. Then his son walks in. "Dad, I" he picks up a gun and shoots him square in the fucking temple. "I cancelled this!" He laughed. "And now I'll cancel YOU!" He points the gun through the tv at me and shoots the screen. I heard a loud whizbang pop and the TV exploded. Hot pieces of glass flew back, along with shards of taco bell 7 layer fun crunch and pieces of my hopes and dreams. I... was permanently blind.
I woke up in the hospital, but I was going to be tried for murder. Evidently during the entirety of the lost episode fiasco somebody ordered for a pizza and sent John Lovitz, the voice actor to deliver it. That's...not a coincidence. John Lovitz was out of work and needed to deliver pizzas for some extra cash. Problem was, I was missing both my eyes and accidentally spilled some hot cofco on him . Lovitz had a rare coffee bean allergy, being that he's part of the Annunaki tribe that lives underground in the secret tunnels where Mr. Groening and I used to take to work. They cuffed me and led me into the police car. My life was cancelled.
I had to serve my day in court, missing both of my eyes. "Your honor." I said. "I have no lawyer, I represent myself today. What makes a man? Is it his eyes? Is it his heart? Or is it The Critic, the greatest program that you've never watched? I mean, maybe I killed those people, but aren't we all killers in a way? You yourself are inhaling and killing bacteria right now every second that you breathe. But I wouldn't arrest you. You have to breathe, and I have to order pizza. Bottom line is, if you didn't like the critic growing up its entirely possible that you didn't have a childhood. I really think you should give the program a chance. I may be blind in both of my eyes and missing a small part of my brain due to tortilla chip interference, but there is one thing that I can see: the Critic was a great show that warmed the hearts of millions worldwide and continues to be the pinnacle of quality writing. Like that scene where they're sitting and watching the golden gate bridge and then the bridge falls? That's deep humor, you wouldn't get it, you're- you're not from San Francisco."
The judge stopped, astonished. His eyes probably grew wide (I couldn't see) and then he applauded. "Young Man." (I'm 30) he said. "In 30 years of serving on the bar I have never seen such a courageous act of self-reverence toward quality writing. You may be missing both your eyes, but you have another fatal birth defect: an enlarged heart made of gold. Case dismissed, you are free to go. Bailiff, take off those cuffs. This man has some critic to complement."
Things have gotten better since then. I'm getting better every day. I have a new house, a new job and a new life. The medication is helping me regain my eyesight, and I'm starting to make out the shapes of Jay Sherman and friends while I watch reruns. I'm getting better every day, in fact. You couldn't kill me, dad. After some time the bad memories go away and you're just left with a little pinhole image recreation in your head, and you have dreams and sometimes the dreams write over the facts, so you can't remember. The memory is like a tape recorder. Matt Groening apologized, he said it's just coffee, and the aliens are back. I'm not at liberty to discuss it, but we're all friends now. Everything gets better every day and I'm ok. They took me on their space ship last night. They told me I never even watched the critic! So what was that show? Some kind of...program. The Matt Groening hologram smiled at me. "We knew this day would come, B. Simpson. The day when you see through the feeble rules of society and end up here, in the writers room." He reached out his alien hand, a third eye emerging in the Matt Groening. "You saw through the secret messages, and that's why I made you my intern. But there is a day when the protégé must succeed the mentor." He reached out his hand, holding a warm cup of coffee. The java bubbled, shook and shimmered. I reached out, but I was still partially blind. My hand missed and the java spilled back, permanently scalding Mr. Groening's pristine face. "This hurts!" He screamed, as his face melted into a puddle of glue.
There are actually over 260 episodes of the critic, held in a vault somewhere in middle America. No one can watch them. No one can watch anything. Not just because I'm blind. Not just because I'm bart simpson, made real by the creators when B. Simp saw the pen hand, Einstein multiverse theories and coffee, so much coffee.
The show was cancelled. I didn't cancel it, but The show was cancelled.
The show. Was. Cancelled.
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