Sunday, May 30, 2010

The Drew Carey Show Episodes

By Terrie Jenkins

Seinfeld gets a lot of attention, as it well should, as having been one of the most innovative sitcoms of the nineties. However, The Drew Carey Show really made just as many important innovations in the television show format as Seinfeld, even if people mainly remember it as one of those shows you watch when there was nothing else on. Put it on your list next time you visit your movie download service and see what the show was really all about.

It could have just been another formulaic sitcom. Many comedians, they get a TV deal so the first thing they do is create just another family sitcom. The blue collar dad, the football widow wife, the kids (usually a daughter and a son) and the wacky neighbor. The Drew Carey Show, while still being more or less based on the comedian's act, also took the sitcom in a new direction.

Like Seinfeld, it used less formulaic plots and created funnier, weirder situations, but unlike Seinfeld, really applied a degree of surrealism and absurdity to the proceedings. The cast was never afraid to break into song and do a musical episode, or just a musical number in a non-musical episode, and the rivalry between Drew and Mimi was really a fun, quirky driving force for the show.

Like Seinfeld, the show never really delved into the same formulaic plots about Superbowl parties and so on, and really went in a whole new direction creating its own, new concepts for great TV stories. It's about the existential dread, the fear you feel when you're anywhere between thirty and fifty and wondering why your life didn't shape up the way you wanted it to. It's really interesting, and a little deeper than the usual Football Widow jokes you see in most sitcoms.

By the final season, Carey was making somewhere around a million bones an episode, but... The ratings started to slip. Drew Carey had a strong and loyal following, but it just wasn't enough to keep the show on the air any longer. Sadly, the show is not syndicated anywhere in the US right now, nor have they ever released anything beyond the first season on DVD, so watching online is probably the only way to enjoy it anymore.

The most refreshing thing about the show really was that its focus wasn't on the same thing as every other show. No football widow jokes, no stories about the son borrowing the car without asking. The characters are easier to relate to because they don't feel like generic television characters.

The show also feels refreshing in that it acknowledges that mom, dad and the kids are not, in fact, the only form a family can take, nor are mom, dad and the kids the only people in the US who matter. The show is, again, focused on single people, and the result is a show that really validates you no matter who you are in life and what you've accomplished so far.

And of course, it's funny. Lewis and Oswald may well be the second and third funniest comic relief characters of the nineties, after Cosmo Kramer, of course. It's always fun when a show that's already a comedy features comic relief characters. Fourth place, of course, goes to Zoidberg, of Futurama. - 38505

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