The Danza: As with The Simpsons, in The Critic, Doris Grau voices yet another chain-smoking, sarcastic, old lady named Doris (only here, she's a make-up lady for a fat, ugly film critic, not a school lunchlady).
Hey, It's That Voice!: For those of you who remember SNL in the mid-to-late 1980s, that's pathological liar Tommy Flanagan (or The Master Thespian) as Jay Sherman.
The late Doris Grau was the voice of Jay's make-up lady Doris Grossman. On The Simpsons, she also played a character named Doris (the lunchlady-cum-Lethal Chef at Springfield Elementary).
The Other Darrin: Rhea Perlman (best known as Carla Tortelli from Cheers) replaced Brenda Vaccaro as the voice of Ardeth in the second season for two episodes.
Rerun: The show was in reruns on Comedy Central back in the early 2000s, but the show has since vanished from the airwaves (at least in America). The entire series (including the webisodes) have been released on DVD.
FOX was noted to have been far worse than ABC. While the series suffered in the ratings in Season 1, Season 2 was actually successful — retaining much of The Simpsons lead-in. However, after FOX first picked up the series, new executives took over and didn't want it. Al Jean has also suggested that because FOX didn't own the series, they were far less inclined to keep it going. Worst of all, FOX purposefully didn't officially cancel the series like ABC did - all just to prevent UPN (or anyone else for that matter) from picking it up.
What Could Have Been: "Every Doris Has Her Day" was going to use Cat Stevens's songs from Harold and Maude instead of "A Bicycle Built for Two", to spoof the growing friendship between Jay and Doris, but the producers couldn't get the rights.
The show was originally going to be live-action, with John Lovitz playing Jay. This never came to be due to potentially high production costs.
Cyrus was going to make a second appearance if the series continued.
About nine scripts were written for a possible Season 3. One story idea was a parody of Single White Female, with Jay meeting his biggest fan, who promptly models himself more and more on him. The fan would've been voiced by Maurice LaMarche, who would increasingly impersonate Lovitz as the episode went on.
Some in-show examples include:
Executive Meddling: Duke tries to retool Coming Attractions on more than one occasion, and in "Dr. Jay" he invents "Phillipsvision", which digitally alters classic movies to give them all happier endings. Jay also faces this in "L.A. Jay", in which he is hired to write the screenplay for Ghostchasers 3.
Al Jean has alluded to this trope being very much the case in real-life in DVD commentaries for both this series and The Simpsons.
This is why distinguished actor Sir Roger Twicenightly did the film Howard Stern's End. And in this universe, Orson Welles not only did commercials in his waning years (such as for Rosebud Frozen Peas and Blotto Bros. Wine), but Video Wills! (See below) He will do ads for Mrs. Pell's Fish Sticks for free, however. They're even better raw! And when you're dead!
