Prime Time’s New Man About ‘Toon : Pompous, loud, a zero with women--OK, so Jon Lovitz’s ‘The Critic’ isn’t the coolest guy around. Still, this new creation of the ‘Simpsons’ team aims to become the first animated show to repeat the success of Bart and Co.

Behind a glass partition in a small, wood-paneled recording studio on the Sony Pictures Entertainment lot, Jon Lovitz reads and rereads some lines of dialogue into a big black microphone. Flanking him on the other side of the glass, giving him patient directions and guidance, are Al Jean and Mike Reiss, the two unassuming guys who wrote his lines.

Jean and Reiss, self-described nerds in high school, rose from staff writers to executive producers of “The Simpsons,” which they left after last season to create ABC’s new series “The Critic.” The broad animated parody, premiering at 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, revolves around Lovitz as a pudgy, balding and unlovable film critic whose gunky hair comes out of a spray can.

The show is yet another attempt by the networks to find a prime-time cartoon hit like “The Simpsons”--but this time with people who actually worked on Fox’s breakthrough series: Jean, Reiss and co-executive producer James L. Brooks.

“A date for the theater. Let’s check my little black book,” Lovitz says spryly into the mike, sounding very much like the snobby character he developed for the “Get to Know Me” sketch he used to do on “Saturday Night Live.” “Hmmm. AAA Escort Service. Sister Dominica. Glenn/Glenda.” He’s not happy with any of the names he reads. “Ahhh, hello, Helen!”

Unfortunately, according to the script, Helen is still trying to scrub her body clean after her last date with Lovitz’s character, Jay Sherman. So Sherman tries to find a date by holding an impromptu trivia contest on his movie-review TV show.

“So, ladies, just call in if you know the name of Spielberg’s adorable extraterrestrial,” Lovitz says, still reading from the script. “I’ll take the 29th caller.” There’s a pause. Lovitz appeals pathetically: “Cute little alien. Anyone? I’ll give you a hint: E . . . Oh! We have a caller. The alien’s name was?”

“Richard Dreyfuss,” drawls an actress with a hoarse, throaty voice, standing beside Lovitz.

Lovitz sighs deeply. “Uh, do you have a sister?” he asks.

Reiss cuts in and says, “OK, that was good. Now, let’s try it again.”

“Well, if it was so good, why are we doing it again ? Let’s cut through the crap,” Lovitz says, affecting the pompous attitude of a big shot, turning his nose up and puffing an imaginary cigar. “And when are you going to rename this building after me, the way you promised?”

Jean and Reiss look at each other and bust out laughing.

In “The Critic,” a half-hour comedy set in New York, Sherman reviews movies on his own cheesy cable-TV show, rating them from cold to hot on his “Shermometer.” His big catch phrase is “It stinks.” His only real fans are drunken frat boys who like to make fun of him.

The movies Sherman critiques are all parodies, such as “Rabbi P.I.,” in which an Arnold Schwarzenegger knockoff plays a Chicago cop who goes undercover as a Hasidic Jew. In the film clip Sherman reviews, an animated Schwarzenegger holds a scalpel and stands nervously over a baby. A mob boss commands him: “All right, if you are a real rabbi, circumcise this child.” Suddenly, the Schwarzenegger character hurls the scalpel, hitting the mob boss in the heart, and says, “Hava nagila, baby.”

When he’s not reviewing movies, the divorced Sherman is giving bad advice to his son, Marty; seeking advice from his hunky Australian actor friend, Jeremy; or trying to trade on his questionable celebrity for dates with women or a good seat in his favorite restaurant, L’Ane Riche (translation: the Wealthy Jackass).

Jean and Reiss, college roommates who started working together on the Harvard Lampoon in the late 1970s, know all too well the odds against success for a prime-time cartoon series. In one scene from the 1992 “Simpsons” Halloween special they produced, the camera panned across tombstones in a pet cemetery engraved with the names of the shows that tried to follow in “The Simpsons’ ” footsteps: Steven Bochco’s “Capitol Critters” on ABC, “Fish Police” from Hanna-Barbera Studios and “Family Dog” from Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton on CBS.

Now it’s time for Jean and Reiss, who have a development deal with Brooks, to put up themselves. Their credits included “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” “Sledge Hammer!” and “Alf” before landing at “The Simpsons” in 1989. They became executive producers, supervising the writing and all creative aspects.

“It is tough,” Reiss said. “The other animated shows that came after us weren’t very good, and they really got slammed, but it’s a very hard process.”

Indeed, “The Simpsons” is the only prime-time cartoon series to find lasting success on one of the networks since “The Flintstones” three decades earlier. In general, the networks have shied away from prime-time animation because it’s extremely expensive and time consuming: A half-hour sitcom may air two weeks after shooting, while a half-hour episode of animation takes roughly nine months to produce.

“The guardians of the market at the networks have an agenda that they have to deal with, and animation is difficult for them to fit into their agenda,” observed Fred Seibert, president of Hanna-Barbera Studios. “The really tough challenge the networks have is dealing with the lead time of animation. They’re used to much quicker turnaround in their schedules and much smaller episode commitments than are affordable in animation.”

“We immediately jumped right into ‘The Critic’ with no reservations whatsoever,” deadpanned Stuart Bloomberg, vice president of programming for ABC, who ordered 13 episodes of “The Critic.”

Oh, really?

“Of course not,” he said. “It’s animation. It’s really scary. All of the problems that animation brings loom heavy. It’s that whole timing situation, in which you have to commit to a series really without seeing much of anything first. You sort of close your eyes and hope. You know, there were smart people behind ‘Capitol Critters,’ and it didn’t work for any number of reasons--pick them.”

For Jean and Reiss, there’s no real mystery why the other prime-time animated efforts didn’t work out.

“The difference between ‘The Simpsons’ and, say, ‘Fish Police,’ is that we just poured a tremendous amount of time and money into the writing,” Jean said. “We had a staff of Emmy winners, people who had done some of the best work on TV, working nonstop and really honing these scripts, making sure that they were human and believable.

“To pick on one of the other shows: When I read the script for ‘Fish Police,’ I said, ‘This is all puns about fish. I don’t know why they think that this is the same as “The Simpsons.” ’ I mean, ‘The Simpsons’ is clearly written to appeal to all ages, with adults in mind, and the other one seemed like it was written just for kids 8 and under.”

Unlike “The Simpsons,” which was spun off from animated shorts that Matt Groening did on Fox’s “The Tracey Ullman Show,” “The Critic” was sold to ABC strictly on the strength of the pilot script. “Hava nagila, baby,” Bloomberg said, laughing.

“I look at it as a gamble, sure. But it’s hard to deny these scripts,” added Bloomberg, who already has ordered an additional 13 scripts to be written and ready to go into production for next season in case “The Critic” does catch on with viewers. “I mean, they are just consistently funny. We’ve said no to a lot --a lot --of animation. Certainly after ‘Capitol Critters,’ it’s got to take something pretty special. This was very difficult to say no to.”

To keep the writing sharp on “The Critic,” Jean and Reiss carefully selected a stable of writers with experience in sophisticated comedy--not screwball animation. Their writers include “Seinfeld” producers Tom Gammill and Max Pross, Nell Scovell from “Murphy Brown,” former “In Living Color” writer Steve Tompkins, former “Simpsons” writer Jon Vitti, former David Letterman writer Ken Keeler and Patric Verrone, who worked with Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show.”

“Believe me, I don’t want to be cocky,” Jean said, “because there’s a huge chance this will fail, but we’re at least trying to approach it in the ‘Simpsons’ manner, using all the best writers we can find and really working on the scripts before they get filmed.”

In some ways, animation is a writer’s paradise because there are no limits.

“On ‘The Simpsons,’ and we do it a lot on this show, you can say Homer Simpson is stupid and fat and ugly and he smells,” Reiss said. “If they were real actors, you just couldn’t write that. You couldn’t write those jokes. Actors do have feelings. That’s why you don’t hear fat jokes on ‘Roseanne,’ even though if you were going to take a shot, that’s the first one you would take.”

And the characters in “The Critic” don’t pull any punches. “I sort of have a theory that the only way the kind of people we’re writing about in ‘The Critic’ can be sympathetic is if you draw them,” Brooks said with a wry smile.

The downside is the long lead time: None of “The Critic” movie parodies can be very current. As a result, “We’re doing a lot of different ‘Jurassic Park’ jokes, and we hope people will remember the movie in six months,” Reiss said. There are also more timeless sequel satires--such as “Home Alone 5,” in which the kid is 23 with a beard and still living at home holding his head screaming--and parodies of such genres as movies adapted from TV shows (in one bit, Marlon Brando receives $8 million to play Mr. French in “Family Affair: The Movie”).

“Hey, I said it should look nothing like me!” Lovitz cried, staring at a new lapel pin featuring his squat character--a sort of cross between Danny DeVito and Charlie Brown. “I don’t want to become Mr. Magoo,” he said in reference to the popular animated character who ended up typecasting the voice actor who played him, Jim Backus, because the two bore a vague resemblance.

Lovitz, whose film career is taking off, seriously considered passing on “The Critic” for fear of becoming stuck in people’s mind as the guy who does that cartoon : “I was watching a movie on TV where the guy who did Fred Flintstone (Alan Reed) was playing a lawyer. I said, ‘Hey, that’s Fred! He’s not right for that role.’ So it’s a legitimate concern. But most people said, ‘Well, you’re already known and established, so it wouldn’t be like that.’ ”

Lovitz was persuaded to do “The Critic” after reading the pilot script and also seeing the critical praises heaped upon Robin Williams as the genie’s voice in “Aladdin.”

“When Robin Williams did ‘Aladdin,’ everyone knew it was him and it was fun,” Lovitz said. “After something like that, animation almost becomes hip to do.”

Brooks was won over by Lovitz’s comedic abilities when he saw an advance screening of “A League of Their Own.” Many critics thought Lovitz stole the show as the obnoxious talent scout Ernie Capadino in what turned out to be a career-making role. After that, film offers began pouring in, and Lovitz now has several movies awaiting release. He plays the lawyer of Elijah Wood, who divorces his parents in director Rob Reiner’s “North,” and he’s Billy Crystal’s brother in the sequel to “City Slickers.” He’s now working on the comedy “Home for the Holidays,” in which he’s Nicolas Cage’s brother.

In fact, it was because of Lovitz’s busy film schedule that “The Critic” is animated at all. Brooks initially wanted to do a live-action TV series in 1992 about a morning network news program from the perspective of the makeup woman, with the film critic as a peripheral character. Once Brooks envisioned Lovitz as the film critic, however, he decided to make the critic the star of the show.

But Lovitz didn’t want to commit to the full-time chores of a live-action comedy series.

“We had actually used John as a guest star on ‘The Simpsons,’ ” Jean said. “When we recorded ‘The Simpsons’ with him, we were laughing so hard we were ruining the takes. Honestly, we were. So he was the only one we ever wanted. And we said, ‘Well, if he’s going to do movies, we can make it animated and probably make the whole thing work.’ ”

Brooks wasn’t excited about that prospect, given the grueling task of producing animation. After “The Simpsons,” Brooks said, “there was a little bit of never again. It’s always been a desperate struggle to get ‘The Simpsons’ right. It’s not like we figured out one day, this is what works, and then everything was easy. As a matter of fact, ‘The Simpsons’ continues to be the most exhausting show on television. The burnout rate is amazing.

“But then here we are,” Brooks said with a sigh.

The reason he agreed to go through it again? Because he really wanted Lovitz. Now, Lovitz can spend just a few weeks each season in the recording studio taping an entire season’s worth of episodes, leaving him free to pursue movies.

“There will never be another genesis for a show like this again,” Brooks said. “This has been the longest journey to get a specific actor for something, because it went on forever. But it ended up the way it seemed like it was supposed to end up.”