Tuesday, September 14, 2010

An Interesting Review Of The Drew Carey Show

By Dwight Mccoy

Seinfeld is always regarded as the most innovative, and perhaps most important, television series of the nineties, but as far as sitcoms go, The Drew Carey Show certainly deserves to be listed right alongside Seinfeld. Most people don't remember the show quite as clearly as Seinfeld, but it really did make a lot of changes to how people regard the modern sitcom, and definitely deserves to go on the list next time you login to the movie download service of your choice.

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.

The show made a lot of artistic innovations with its weird format episodes like the live, improve event episodes and some interesting directorial touches like the "World Keeps Turning" intro. The show allowed its writers, directors and actors to really take a lot of chances and explore new territory with every single aspect of the show, resulting in a quirky sitcom unlike anything else we'd ever seen on television.

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 really refreshing in the way that it did not focus on the same tired issues as every other show out there at the time. It wasn't the same old "Uh oh it's football season" jokes, it wasn't the son borrowing the car without asking, it was something a lot more interesting and less predictable, and this was really the rejuvenation the sitcom format needed, alongside Seinfeld, after decades of the same old stuff day in day out.

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. - 40727

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