"Why must you people insist I learn your names?" – Max Louis ("Meet the Max Louis" [5-2])   "No one wants to know the real me! Because I’m… I’m… weird." – Max Louis ("Lucky Burger" [5-3])

Jon Lovitz came on board in season five after Phil Hartman’s death. A longtime friend and colleague of Hartman, Lovitz graciously agreed to join the show that featured the role that was Hartman’s greatest testament. Paul Simms surmised the feelings around the addition of Lovitz in an interview, "Jon was really our only choice. For us it’s a way of sort of having Phil around still."

There is no denying that Jon Lovitz has considerable comic talent. I just do not think that his comic talent was well suited to NewsRadio. Lovitz is a verbal comedian, and his comedy noticeably slowed down the fast-paced physical-verbal comedy of the rest of the cast. Certainly, he was nowhere near as subtle as Phil Hartman was, but the disparity between his comedy and the show’s inherent physical-verbal style made his acting seem even more like ‘scenery chewing.’ This would be more tolerable if Lovitz’s Max Louis was also a morally expressive character like the rest of the cast (see "Morally expressive art" in this essay, vide infra). However, the inherent anti-moral nature of Max meant that his presence on the screen fractured the show’s moral relationships both by form (slower verbal comedy) and content (anti-moral character). After Hartman’s death, an extra cast member was needed to bolster the ensemble cast, which was lacking in breadth, but unfortunately Lovitz was far from a perfect fit. Eventually, the Max Louis character became better integrated with the rest of the cast towards the end of the last season when they started to use him more like a Matthew than a Bill McNeal. However, it was still not enough to restore full balance to the cast.