Monday, May 3, 2010

Movie Download Services Have The Drew Carey Show

By Tim Herrera

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.

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, 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 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 serves as an acknowledgement that mom, dad and the kids aren't the only people in the universe, that there are many definitions for the word family, and that the relationships between a man and his friends is every bit as important and valid as the relationship between a man and his wife and his children.

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.

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