Hire the Critic

Ooh, looks like Ralph the Reviewer has made some pretty scathing comments in his new review of The Trope Tale! He says it's got a terrible plot, the storyline is too familiar, the characters are bland, etc. I bet the author of The Trope Tale, hard at work on the sequel, won't be too happy to hear his dissent! He might even write in a jab or two!

Next on Ralph the Reviewer: "Apologies, but my reviews are going to be put on hold for a time, because I've just been hired to work The Trope Tale 2 as its script supervisor." Wait, what?!

Why would an author of a media work hire a guy who hated his previous stuff? Maybe he agrees with the critic and wants help to avoid more story problems. Maybe he wants an Honest Advisor who won't be afraid to tell him what's wrong. Maybe it's to back up his Let's See You Do Better challenge. Maybe it's to show him how hard helming a story really is, and that it's easy to criticize it when you don't know its trials. Or maybe it's to nullify the critic, because he'll be less likely to criticize something if he worked on it, right?

Compare Cast the Expert, which a critic may technically be, an expert on story. Contrast Take That, Critics! and Promoted Fanboy.

Examples of Hire the Critic include:

Real Life Examples

Film

• A frequent topic on Aaron McGruder's comic strip The Boondocks was Jar Jar Binks and the racial stereotyping he portrayed. For the production of Red Tails, a George Lucas film about the Tuskegee Airmen, guess who got hired as its screenwriter? That's right, Aaron McGruder.^[1]
• For The Ultimate Matrix Collection, the filmmakers included two Alternate DVD Commentaries, one by philosophers who loved the movies, and one by critics who hated them.
• Novelist Barry Gifford wrote a piece that was highly critical of David Lynch's attempt at Film Noir atmosphere in Blue Velvet. Lynch went on to adapt one of Gifford's books as Wild at Heart and cowrote the screenplay for Lost Highway with him.
• Neil De Grasse Tyson wasn't very happy about how the night sky in Titanic had been lazily mirrored. He ribbed James Cameron about it several times, the final time Cameron cooly responding "Last time I checked, 'Titanic' sold $1.3 billion worth of tickets, worldwide. Imagine how many more tickets we would have sold if we'd gotten the sky right." That deflated Tyson, but to his delight a few months later he was hired to provide a correct star map for the film's 10th anniversary DVD and 3D re-release.

Video Games

• Luke Smith of 1UP got hired to Bungie after he wrote the article "Broken Halo", where he criticized Halo 2's multiplayer for being highly unbalanced.
• Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw was once asked to write Duke Nukem Forever. But they turned him down because his script was parodying Duke himself, while the developers at the time wanted to make him the Straight Man.

Western Animation

• The Simpsons: John Kricfalusi has been a long-time critic of The Simpsons (and nearly all modern cartoons, for that matter), so naturally they hired him to do a Couch Gag for them. A very strange one.

In-Universe Examples

Live Action TV

• At one point in Seinfeld, George decides that his choices have been taking him in the wrong direction, and resolves to always do the opposite of what he would have done. When he's interviewing for a job with the New York Yankees, he meets Mr. Steinbrenner for the first time. Keeping with his resolution, George greets him with a frank and brutal condemnation of his work. Mr. Steinbrenner responds with an emphatic "Hire this man!"

Web Original

• The Nostalgia Critic is frequently pestered by the troll Douchey McNitpick, who is constantly pointing out all of the Critic's mistakes. At one point, the Critic decides to just hire Douchey as a fact checker, but Douchey turns down the job "because then I wouldn't get to complain about [your mistakes]!"

Web Comics

• In PvP, Max Powers concludes that the company is going bankrupt, information he obtained by breaking into Cole's office to examine the finances. When he confronts Cole with his suspicions, Cole angrily fires him. Later, Cole comes to his senses. He rehires Max under the title of Chief Financial Officer, and follows his plan to save the company.
• Something*Positive: Davan is hired by the producer of Ollie's play after the producer cuts their funding, leading Davan to give a scathing "The Reason You Suck" Speech. The next panel is Davan telling Pejee he doesn't understand why he got hired.

Western Animation

• The Simpsons is no stranger to this:
  • In the episode "Beyond Blunderdome", Mel Gibson ends up hiring Homer Simpson after the latter gives a scathing review of his remake of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, because he believes Homer is the only man brave enough to tell him the truth.
  • In another episode, Homer loses his job at the power plant, starting a chain of events that results in him leading a protest against the danger to the community posed by the plant. In order to silence the protest, Mr. Burns hires Homer as the safety inspector.
  • But Inverted Trope in "Guess Who's Coming to Criticize Dinner", where Homer gets hired as a critic to the local paper because he doesn't criticize their food so much.

1. ↑ And he claimed he was so excited to work with George Lucas that the topic of Jar Jar never came up once!