I never thought about that until I read another thread online pertaining to Brett Butler's recent revelation that she was broke and facing eviction after earning $25 million. The point is that even if Brett was able to remain sober and corporative to work with, was the show (https://web.archive.org/web/20061031122307/http://www.jumptheshark.com/g/graceunderfire.htm) never truly going to fulfil its promise?

Basically, do you feel that when compared to somebody like Roseanne Barr, Brett Butler was unable to grow as an actress? Brett on Grace Under Fire, was pretty much playing her stand-up persona and the entire show was built on her firing one liners one after an other.

Normally, the better sitcoms that star a stand-up comedian (such as Roseanne, Seinfeld, and Everybody Loves Raymond) either feature people who had some experience with acting beforehand, or like I said, soon grew into things.

Also, these sitcoms were you can argue, smart enough to balance out rest of supporting cast with those that had serious acting chops. So on ELR, you had Doris Roberts, Peter Boyle, Patricia Heaton, and Brad Garrett providing excellent support as an ensemble cast behind Ray Romano.

Was the ensemble cast on Grace Under Fire in comparison, really that spectacular outside of merely being there to have Brett Butler bounce her one-liners off of?

Wasn't Dave Thomas another standup guy? I just remember him from SCTV.

And the ELR comparison is a good one, because Ray Romano's background was strictly standup. As pointed out his backup cast was stellar.

Grace Under Fire was good, a much better blue collar comedy than overrated Roseanne. The supporting cast on Raymond was talented, but that was really offset by lousy lead Ray Romano.

i really like Grace!

I thought the show was funny; at one time it was the second-best blue-collar comedy on TV (behind Roseanne). The ensemble cast was good, but several actors (Nadine and Quinton) ended up exiting as a direct result of Brett Butler's drug-fueled antics on the set. The series couldn't recover after a third of the cast left, and that final season just felt empty. Brett slowly destroyed her show and then her career. It was really unfortunate.