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Tuesday, September 14, 2010

An Interesting Review Of The Drew Carey Show

By Dwight Mccoy

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.

The show also made a lot of artistic strides as a sitcom, such as the "World Keeps Turning" intro, the live episodes and various other tricks they used to keep the show fresh.

The show left a lot of room open for exploration on the part of its writers, directors and performers. It wasn't formulaic, it let them get away with whatever they wanted to try, and the result was a really unique and fresh show.

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

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