The Drew Carey Show

In this fallow period of unemployment (which will come to an end, at least temporary, week after next) I've found myself watching TV at unusual hours of the day. I've discovered that a network called Ion plays back to back episodes of The Drew Carey Show at four, and I've become a regular viewer. While shows like Seinfeld and The Simpsons can be seen several times on different stations, this is one that I haven't seen on the syndicated dial before.

The show, starring the stand-up comedian (and now an improbable host of The Price is Right) ran for nine years on ABC and was a modest hit for a time. But it was never a show that attained "watercooler" status, instead getting steady ratings for a while until it finally petered out. I would imagine few would name it as their favorite show, but it's an amiable half-hour with occasionally good jokes that attempted to represent a certain demographic.

In a way, it's the Bizarro Seinfeld. Seinfeld's show focused on a core cast of four: three men and one woman, all trying to find happiness with the opposite sex. But while Seinfeld dealt with a kind of upper-middle-class sensibility, Drew Carey was aggressively lower middle-class. Also, Seinfeld's character, with the exception of Kramer, were riddled with neuroses, while those on Carey were far less deep, and weren't exceptionally self-reflective.

For most of the show's run, Carey was a human resources manager at a Cleveland department store (the show embraced Carey's Cleveland roots). With his crew-cut, black-rimmed glasses and pear shape, he was decidedly not the leading man type. He was a white-collar worker, but with a blue-collar outlook, constantly being put upon by his employer and unlucky in love, but with a perpetually optimistic outlook. The show seemed to say that no matter how shitty life can get, as long as you have friends to drink beer with things will be okay.

Those friends were Louis (Ryan Stiles), a lanky janitor and weirdo (a Cleveland version of Kramer). He was frequently teamed with Oswald (Diedrich Bader) who was the show's dimbulb. Kate (Christa Miller), was the pretty girl who preferred to hang out with the guys (Elaine, if she hadn't gone to college). Over the course of the series Kate was engaged to Oswald and then dated Drew, but Miller left the show before it ended the run.

The show also had a workplace cast, with Kathy Kinney as Mimi, who was Drew's foil, a rotund and rude woman who wore garish makeup and circus-like costumes, and Craig Ferguson as Mr. Wick, Drew's boss, an Englishman with slippery morals.

If the show wasn't brilliant comedy, it was ambitious, with several gimmicks over the years, such as breaking into musical numbers, having a live show that included improvisation, and over the last two seasons it rebooted, with some of the actors playing different characters, or the same characters but in different jobs. You get the idea that meetings in the writers' room were spirited affairs, with lots of brainstorming and an anything goes approach.

As funny as the show it could be, it was also hamstrung by some of the conventions of the sit-com. The laugh track at times was notoriously cheesy, with sentimental moments accompanied by a treacly "aawww" sound. Also, Carey wasn't much of an actor, delivering most of his lines similarly. The rest of the cast, made up of more accomplished thespians, did their best to distract from Carey's weaknesses (of course, this is another similarity to Seinfeld).