Well, ah, of course not. But the man who invented Saturday Night Live‘s Tommy Flanagan — president of Pathological Liars Anonymous — has returned to TV in The Critic, a half-hour animated comedy produced by some of the same inspired doodlers who produced The Simpsons. Lovitz is the voice of Jay Sherman, a balding, divorced Jewish intellectual New York film critic who hosts a Sneak Previews-style cable-TV show in which he reviews such faux flicks as Rabbi P.I., starring a cartoon Ah-nuld (”Hava nagila, baby”). He’s got his own snappy catchphrase (”It stinks!”), a clueless 11-year-old son, adoptive WASP parents in Connecticut, and enough Manhattan angst to give Woody’s therapist the heebie-jeebies.
His film prospects improved after he played the cynical baseball scout Ernie ”Cappy” Capadino in Penny Marshall’s 1992 hit, A League of Their Own. This summer he’ll be Billy Crystal’s loser brother in City Slickers II (opening June 10), and the movie he’s making now with Carvey and Cage (planned for October) promises to offer his juiciest role yet. He plays one of three bank-robbing brothers who find themselves charmed by the small town they’ve just ripped off (”Midnight Run meets It’s a Wonderful Life,” Carvey describes it).
What ultimately nudged him into doing the show was the pilot’s savagely satirical script, chock-full of sly movie-industry in-jokes and cameos by Jerry Seinfeld and Al Sharpton knockoffs. But to seal the deal, Lovitz made Reiss and Jean promise that his animated character wouldn’t resemble the real Lovitz too much (the ‘toon they came up with looks more like Charlie Brown crossed with Danny DeVito). They also agreed to work around his film schedule and provide a stand-in voice for times when Lovitz wasn’t available (”Just for grunts and groans and stuff,” says Reiss. ”Jon does all the real dialogue himself”). In the end, it may have been Lovitz’s smartest career move: The critics love The Critic (although Lovitz doesn’t return the favor: ”A lot of them are just jealous of the people they’re writing about”), and ABC has enough faith in the show to run it in one of its best time slots, as the lead-in to the network’s No. 1 series, Home Improvement (the Jan. 26 premiere pulled in 27 million viewers).