Sunday, October 24, 2010

An Interesting Review Of The Comedy Series Drew Carey Show

By Billie Campbell

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 was really just meant as a vehicle to get Drew Carey's face out there back in the era where every comedian really just wanted to be a TV star, and it could have been just another sitcom with just another comedian starring, but they managed to really take it in a different direction, starting with the subject of the show.

Like Seinfeld, the show abandoned the idea of formulaic plots to take things in its own direction, focusing on a man who is always on the verge of a mid-life crisis and who experiences real existential dread at his situation in life, what it all means and whether or not he'd be happier if he'd just leap off a bridge and end it all already.

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.

It's something of an acknowledgement that family can mean "You and your friends", that family can be defined however you choose to define it, and that the mom, dad and kids aren't the only backbone of family in the United States, and furthermore, that for family to only possibly mean dad, mom and kids is really excluding so many other real families from inclusion in what it means to love the people around you.

And of course, Lewis and Oswald may be the two funniest comic relief characters of the nineties... Well, after Cosmo Kramer, you could say. - 42574

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