Wednesday, August 4, 2010

An Interesting Review Of The Drew Carey TV Series

By Brian Bonner

The most important and innovative television series of the nineties was, without a doubt, Seinfeld. However, Drew Carey deserves recognition, as well, as one of the more innovative and inventive shows of that decade. People don't always name it as one of the most innovative series of all time, but in its own way, it was every bit as important to the development and evolution of the American sitcom as Seinfeld and The Simpsons had been. Without Drew Carey, Family Guy might not have grown into such an absurd show in its later seasons. It really changed how people regard and judge the modern sitcom, and it definitely belongs on your list of downloads the next time you log into your movie download service.

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.

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.

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 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, 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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