Monday, December 6, 2010

An Intriguing Review Of The Comedy Series Drew Carey Show

By Eileen Bean


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.

The show could have been just one more formulaic sitcom to throw on the pile. Carey could have played a football dad with a football widow wife, two kids, and a wacky neighbor, but instead, he chose to make the film about a single guy, overweight, with a dead end job and who is just unsatisfied with where his life is at this point.

It's not a family sitcom, it's a single guy sitcom, about a guy in his forties who is not happy with his life.

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 end of the series, Carey was making something like a million dollars an episode but, sadly, the ratings were starting to drop and the show had to be canceled, even though it did garner a loyal following who would always make sure that they were at home after work in time to watch it.

The show was refreshing in that it focused not on a family, but on a single guy who's not all that attractive or in shape and hasn't risen to anything above mid-level department store management in his career. The show focuses on a man who seems to be perpetually on the verge of a mid-life crisis. He's around forty and hasn't really done anything with his life yet. It's really an interesting premise with a lot of room to explore different story ideas without always falling back on the "Son borrows the car without asking" story like so many family based sitcoms.

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, Lewis and Oswald are two of the funniest sitcom characters of all time. It's always funny when a show that's already a comedy has comic relief characters.




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