Over the course of its (remarkably still ongoing) 34-season run, Matt Groening has only asked that his name be scrubbed from the credits of The Simpsons on one occasion. Let that sink in for a moment. When jerkass Homer refused to give poor old Abe his kidney not once, but twice, Groening’s name was there. When Homer got botched laser eye surgery and his eyes made that horrible sound as they crusted over, Groening’s name was there. When the show’s thoughtful epicentre Lisa, and it genuinely pains me to write this, simped over blue tick punching bag Elon Musk, Groening’s name was there. What travesty against eyes, ears, and all that’s holy could possibly incur such a grave judgement? Well folks, to misquote Homer, “It’s not that tough being a film cricket.”
It would be disingenuous to suggest that Matt Groening was so affronted by the idea of a film critic, specifically one Mr. Jay Sherman (voiced by Jon Lovitz), joining the world of Springfield that he kicked up a public stink. Rather, Groening was concerned that the episode in question, ‘A Star is Burns’ (1995), was nothing more than a thinly disguised advertisement for the show Jay called home, The Critic (1994-95), recently cancelled after one season at ABC and given a second chance at Fox. Proposed as a last ditch attempt to support the show and its creators, The Simpsons stalwarts Al Jean, Mike Reiss, and James L. Brooks, Groening took umbrage with leveraging The Simpsons in such a cronyistic fashion. Mystifyingly, Groening had no issue giving ex-writing staff star Conan O’Brien an extended cameo, talk show set and all, one season earlier. Certainly, by the time Homer was brawling Peter Griffin in 2014, it would seem Groening’s pockets were sufficiently fattened to assuage any moral doubts about crossover episodes. That ‘A Star is Burns’ ended up being stuffed to the gills with all-time gags is besides the point—Jay Sherman was persona non grata, about as popular with Groening as Sherman’s real world counterparts are with the moviegoing masses.
It’s fitting then that the episode in question centres on a series of conflicts between the headline acts from each show, Homer Simpsons and Jay Sherman. Paralleling the growing acrimony between Groening and his old writing partners, most particularly Brooks, Homer (team Groening) and Jay (team Brooks) repeatedly come to blows over a variety of issues, from the last pork chop to the correct way to appraise art. Taken textually, the animosity between Homer and Jay functions as a microcosm of a timeless cross-cultural relationship: Homer, the easily-pleased punter, and Jay, the pompous film pundit. Through the pair’s disagreement about the nature of short-form cinema, ‘A Star is Burns’ raises larger questions about the role of critics as entertainers, tastemakers, and idealists, particularly in the face of perceived biases. Should a nationally televised critic reflect the populist desires of their network’s largest audience segment, in the manner of a tabloid 5-star conveyor belt, or is there some loftier ideal that Jay is striving to uphold? Who, in the end, does such a critic serve, and is his name Homer Simpson?
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You’d be hard-pushed to find a better staging ground for said debate than Springfield. In fact, it’s a survey identifying Springfield as the least popular city in America that serves as the episode’s inciting incident: dead last for science, and rock bottom for culture. Ever the well-meaning busybody, Marge suggests that the city hosts a film festival to drum up some good press, drafting in lauded film critic Jay Sherman to lend the fest some legitimacy. Jay is positioned as everything Springfield isn’t, his respected TV show, New York-derived cultural cachet, and scores of award show gongs a distant cry from his fellow jury members’ escapades, be they Mayor Quimby’s salacious sex scandals or Krusty the Clown’s scoffed-at star turn in FDR biopic Sunrise at Campobello. If Jay’s ensuing clash with Homer—the everyman at the heart of that archetypal Middle American city—feels inevitable, so too does Homer’s resultant plea to Marge for a place on the festival jury, intellectually emasculated and boorishly insistent on the value of his own opinion. In a final twist of fate, it falls to Homer to decide between the viscerally gratifying thrills of Hans Moleman’s Man Getting Hit By Football, and the tender tragedy of Barney Gumble’s Pukahontas. A choice for the ages.
Taken as an artefact of the ‘90s, ‘A Star is Burns’ serves as a reminder of how unassailable TV personalities once were. A major novelty of the episode is in bringing Jay, a Gene Siskel type, down from his monastic ivory tower to interact directly with his audience—if not his week-to-week viewership, then at least those his loquacious critiques of pop culture fluff would inevitably touch at some point in the consumer chain. Our first encounter with Jay comes as Lisa and Marge watch his show Coming Attractions together, tickled by his sarcastic takedown of Arnold Schwarzenegger stand-in Rainier Wolfcastle. As Lisa observes, “He’s smart, he’s sensitive, he’s clearly not obsessed with his physical appearance…” Homer, while briefly present, has only recently shaken off an earlier aspersion that he might be Jewish, and is currently debating the identification of a pimple or a boil (later revealed to be a gummy bear). Of course, Homer is very much the target audience for Wolfcastle’s mindless macho schtick, his frequent viewings of the delightfully over-the-top McBain films marking him as exactly the type of rube Jay would hold in contempt. The showdown between the loveable sofa-bound moron and the well-esteemed sardonic critic is thus set.
What complicates the dichotomy between charming oaf and delicate academic is Jay’s own piggishness. Seated at the Simpson family table for a hearty dinner, Homer and Jay’s stomachs growl at each other in the manner of territorial dogs. More egregiously, having flaunted his awards show silverware, Jay faces off against Homer in a burping contest, winning rather handily—a slightly jarring moment given Homer’s impressive gut, and one that mostly feels intended to establish just how fun and crazy Jay is to a new potential audience for The Critic (perhaps this is where Groening first started his grumbling). Regardless, faced with both his intellectual and gluttonous better, it’s natural that Jay makes Homer feel effete, shown up in his own home and poorly humoured by Marge about her regard for his smarts. Jay’s holier-than-thou attitude—his affected smarm, his ostentatious displays of cultural capital, and his “droll wit”, as Marge puts it—repeatedly serves to distance him from Homer, the average content consumer, in spite of their readily apparent similarities as rotund gourmands.
It’s not until we reach the film festival itself, however, that the main confrontation between the pair unfolds, firmly on Jay’s home turf. To illustrate the prevailing wind, when Homer laughs raucously at Hans Moleman’s aforementioned magnum opus, Man Getting Hit By Football, the rest of the audience remains resolutely stony-faced. This, it seems, is the rarified crowd of Springfieldians that Jay’s sort attracts, above laughing at a pensioner whose private parts make a *boink* sound effect when hit with an inflated ball (few things are objectively funny, but it bears saying that I’m team Homer in this instance). To underline this clash of high and low brow, Jay actively dismisses Homer in front of the entire assemblage, loudly exclaiming, “This isn’t America’s Funniest Home Videos.” By targeting Homer for his enjoyment of rudimentary slapstick, Jay shows how cultural standing can be leveraged by critics with a degree of clout to dismiss other perspectives, even those of their supposed peers—while Homer is also on the jury, it’s obvious the audience would defer to the man they already know from their TV screens. One wonders if it was Chaplin getting his testicles pelted whether Jay might suddenly raise a smile.
All this simmering tension bubbles over when the initial round of jury voting results in a tie—two votes for Burns’ navel-gazing epic A Burns for All Seasons from Quimby and Krusty, their palms slick with grease, two votes for Pukahontas, Barney’s Barfly (1987) riff by way of Koyaanisqatsi (1982), from Jay and Marge, and one vote for Man Getting Hit By Football from, you guessed it, Homer. Marge, for her part, is disappointed in Homer, damning him for picking the “stupidest film”. Jay, meanwhile, takes a more measured approach, appealing to a higher idealism for the cinematic form, and suggesting, erroneously, that there may be better things in life than watching a man get hit by a football. With Marge’s stinging rebuttal and Jay’s entreaty in mind, Homer revisits both shorts, succinctly summarising each of their qualities: “Barney’s movie had heart, but football in the groin had a football in the groin.” After much deliberation, the heart wins out.
The question that remains, however, is whether Homer’s decision was truly his own. As part of an institution that dictates signifiers of artistic quality, Jay’s carries a remarkable amount of sway in the shifting sands of public opinion—a relic of an era where a thumbs down from Siskel and Ebert could spell box office disaster. Tormented by Jay’s intellectual repertoire with Marge, and Marge’s disheartened acknowledgement that she knew from the start that she’d regret putting Homer on the jury, in the end he sides with the academically accepted “correct” answer. Indeed, when Marge congratulates him on his choice, she proclaims, “You voted for the right movie!” As an arbiter of quality, battling against bribery and idiocy, The Simpsons seems to suggest that Jay, and thereby the film critic at large, is intended to shape public opinion rather than service the whims of the everyman.
However, if the Jay Sherman we see on The Simpsons is defined by his unwavering, even obnoxious, integrity, on The Critic Jay is frequently forced to forgo his principles, caught between his dedication to honest criticism and the commercial needs of the hand that feeds him. By introducing money-eyed TV producer Duke Phillips (Charles Napier) into the mix, The Critic turns the tempestuous affair between critic and audience into a volatile love triangle. A typical interaction between Duke and Jay goes as follows:
Duke: “Why the hell do you have to be so critical?”
Jay: “I’m a critic.”
Duke: “No, your job is to rate movies on a scale from good to excellent.”
Jay: “What if I don’t like them?”
Duke: “That’s what good is for.”
The Critic suggests that, in the pursuit of ratings, the populist critic is inherently compromised, forced to entertain rather than simply observe and analyse—a reminder of Groening’s beef with Brooks over pimping out The Simpsons. Even the title of Jay’s show, Coming Attractions, has the ring of an enticement. Robbed of his yellow hue and yawning Simpsons overbite, Jay’s outspoken morals play as more performative, a distraction from his juggled roles of critical voice, pop culture entertainer, and walking talking advertisement. There’s a reason why master of the middlebrow Mark Kermode’s most popular clips on YouTube all revolve around him going on some arm-flailing rant. As Duke so eloquently puts it, “This isn’t art, it’s just mindless pablum for people who can’t read.”
The answer as to who the mainstream film critic is intended to serve remains murky then. Cancelled after only two seasons, it’d be convenient to ascribe The Critic’s demise to the American public’s dislike for critical voices on their screens, but the reality is that The Critic lacked the pound-for-pound joke output and well-gelled cast of its sister show (not to mention an odd obsession with fat Marlon Brando). In many episodes Jay’s profession is only as relevant as Homer’s—a function of his everyday life and a framework to hang narrative conceits off of—and yet, he’s defined by his work in a way Homer isn’t, frequently assaulted by the general public for the perceived snobbery of his criticism; pelted with cakes, smacked with newspapers, booed by children, left to fry in a burning building, and brained with a bottle at a screening of Pinocchio (1940). Tragically, our last enduring image of Jay Sherman on broadcast television is a brief cameo in the background of another The Simpsons classic, ‘Hurricane Neddy’ (1996), locked in Calmwood Mental Hospital repeating his catchphrase, “It stinks!”, ad infinitum. Trapped in a purgatorial state, it seems Jay has been damned by his producers for his critical attacks on Hollywood, by the public for his biting comments, and by true cinephiles for his frequent ad spots and gimmicks. Stuck between three masters and able to please not a one, ultimately it would appear that the critic-cum-entertainer struggles to serve anyone—except, perhaps, themselves.
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