Ten Years After The Finale, What Is The Legacy Of ‘The Drew Carey Show’?

[TMC]

http://uproxx.com/tv/2014/09/ten-yea...ew-carey-show/

By Dustin Rowles / 09.08.14

The Drew Carey Show ran for nine seasons, from 1995 to 2004, during the same years that Friends ran on NBC. It always lived in the shadows of better, more popular sitcoms, like Frasier, The Simpsons, Everybody Loves Raymond, Seinfeld and even Spin City. That’s part of the reason that, despite being one of the longest running series of the 90s, it’s not particularly well remembered.

It wasn’t a particularly original or innovative series, either. The writers’ room from that sitcom has not been hugely influential. In fact, of all the writers on the show, the only one you’re likely to recognize is Paul Lieberstein, who played Toby on The Office and was the showrunner during its bad, later seasons. Besides Carey, the most prolific writers on the show have done very little since Drew Carey ended its run. The co-creator/head writer, Bruce Helford, is best known since for creating Charlie Sheen’s Anger Management, and another writer, Ed Lee (responsible for 52 episodes) was a staff writer on Are You There, Chelsea, while Les Firestein (17 episodes) is a writer/producer on FX’s Partners. That’s about it.

The availability of the series has certainly played a major role in its dim legacy. The Drew Carey Show has been on syndication, but it’s never been hugely popular in reruns. In fact, after its initial syndication run on TBS, ION picked it up, and only aired episodes from the first five seasons. The CW aired reruns for a short spell in the late aughts to replace a cancelled block of programming, but as of now, no cable channel airs The Drew Carey Show. Moreover, because of music rights, the series can’t even be found on Netflix. With the exception of the first season, it’s not even a show you can own on DVD. In fact, if you wanted to watch the second season or beyond of The Drew Carey Show right now, you couldn’t do it legally.

It’s also not a series that ever really had huge ratings. It never placed inside the top 10 for any year. It peaked at number 13 in its third and fourth seasons, and then plummeted in the ratings. By the end of the series, no one was watching it. In fact, the only reason there was even a ninth season was because ABC was contractually obligated to air one, which meant that the 26 episode 9th season were burned off over the summer, often two a night. Indeed, a decade ago, when the final season of The Drew Carey Show aired, it was seen by an average of 3.1 million viewers, which is bad even by today’s rating standards. It was the 150th most popular show on the networks. I don’t even remember the finale. Apparently, it was a remake of the pilot episode.

It’s no wonder then, that — with the exception of one actress — almost every one from The Drew Carey Show is better known for something else, even Drew Carey, who is probably better known now as the host of The Price is Right. Diedrich Bader is probably better known for Office Space now. Craig Ferguson, of course, is best known for his late night talk show. Ian Gomez for Felicity and Cougar Town. Christa Miller for Scrubs and Cougar Town. Kate Walsh for Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice. Ryan Stiles for Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Megyn Price for Grounded for Life. Cynthia Watros was Libby on Lost (I don’t even remember her on The Drew Carey Show), and Kaitlin Olson — who had a recurring role in the last two seasons — is best known for It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Because no one watched the last two seasons of Drew Carey, barely anyone even realizes that Olson was on it.

The one major character who is best known for The Drew Carey Show is Kathy Kinney, who is much better known by her character name, Mimi Bobeck.

It’s just not a show that had much of a legacy, to be honest. It isn’t a show that people still quote. It’s not a show that people still watch. It’s not referenced often (in fact, the last time a pop-culture reference was made to it was on an episode of Saturday Night Live in a Guy Fieri sketch). It was never a hugely beloved show.

It was a well-liked show, however. It was a show that we didn’t turn off when we stumbled upon it. It’s a show that sometimes made us laugh. It introduced most of us to Craig Ferguson and Diedrich Bader and Ryan Stiles. It also introduced most of us to the American version of Whose Line Is It Anyway?, which was practically a spin-off of The Drew Carey Show by the end.

In fact, if there’s one thing that The Drew Carey Show is most remembered for, it’s probably the Cleveland Rocks cover from the Presidents of the United States of America, a song that I still think of practically every time I think of the city of Cleveland. No offense, but beyond the Browns and Cavaliers, the only time I ever really think of Cleveland is in the context of The Drew Carey Show, so it at least has that going for it: The Drew Carey Show put Cleveland on the pop-culture map. And that about sums up The Drew Carey Show: It’s the Cleveland of sitcoms.

[tlc38tlc38]

The availability of the series has certainly played a major role in its dim legacy. The Drew Carey Show has been on syndication, but it’s never been hugely popular in reruns. In fact, after its initial syndication run on TBS, ION picked it up, and only aired episodes from the first five seasons. The CW aired reruns for a short spell in the late aughts to replace a cancelled block of programming, but as of now, no cable channel airs The Drew Carey Show. Moreover, because of music rights, the series can’t even be found on Netflix. With the exception of the first season, it’s not even a show you can own on DVD. In fact, if you wanted to watch the second season or beyond of The Drew Carey Show right now, you couldn’t do it legally.

This makes me just shake my head slowly and wave my finger at WB. They should seriously consider releasing more seasons or let Shout! or Time Life release a complete series set. I'd LOVE to own this series on DVD!

Another hope would be Encore classic airing it. I think it would fit in on that network with "Murphy Brown" and "Night Court".

[Mace Dolex]

Wow I can't fathom of the idea of a network contractually obligated to order another season of a low rated sitcom while many better shows get flat out canceled.

[MrCleveland]

DCS did well from 1995 to 2001, but when the 2001-2002 season started (Season 7)...the show waned.

I hope WB can get the music rights to complete DCS, because the way things are going...we'll see a complete series of DCS when Cleveland wins a Championship!

[Blackout]

when drew became a cubscout leader and quit his job the show started to suck


i love the first few seasons and wish they were all out on dvd

[MrCleveland]

Originally Posted by Blackout

when drew became a cubscout leader and quit his job the show started to suck


i love the first few seasons and wish they were all out on dvd

Because of Music Rights...if they can't get a deal, it'll be that "Moon Over Parma" would be the theme, the one that's used in Season 1.

[Blackout]

Originally Posted by MrCleveland

Because of Music Rights...if they can't get a deal, it'll be that "Moon Over Parma" would be the theme, the one that's used in Season 1.

if they don't wanna pay the Presidents of the USA then that's fine


I JUST WANT SEASONS 2, 3 AND 4

[408sitcomfan]

on the Laff channel, which is now on 33 digital subchannels (including for many ABC affiliates/O&Os).

[tlc38tlc38]

^^^I just wish it'd air on a channel more people could get.

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The Drew Carey Show was if I'm not mistaken, actually a good performer, but their production company, Warner Bros, had a big hit in Friends at the same time and that's what the executives at WB were focused on. Even it being a very popular show in syndication didn't get the people at WB to care about them.

Plus, since it wasn't an in-house production, its network, ABC, didn't care that much about The Drew Carey Show. It at first, got good enough ratings and had a loyal following, and the network just promoted it just enough. But in the last three seasons, it dropped to the bottom 100 and then, bottom 200 in ratings. It didn't help that the show's timeslot kept switching and they had to drop some cast members.

[Chocolate Moose]

I guess I understand that. It was cute and funny in its time but it wasn't anything earth shattering. It wasn't a Seinfeld, for sure !

[TMC]

Drew Carey, The Disney Vault & Media Scarcity

The Drew Carey show originally aired the ABC network from September 13th 1995 to September 8th 2004. It was, without a doubt, yet another show that aimed at using the popularity of a stand up comedian, much like Seinfeld had really popularized. While the idea of the comedian TV series is not a new thing by a longshot when Seinfeld came along, there’s absolutely no denying the impact his show had for the next generation of sitcoms that came after it, or even during its run, and The Drew Carey Show is no exception. But really, that singular thing is where the comparisons end. Drew Carey in the show isn’t a comedian, he’s a retail worker, and it was wildly more fantastical and over the top than Seinfeld ever would be, and I say this as an enormous Seinfeld fan girl. Oddly enough, it was also the first television show to have an episode simulcast on the internet, which is a bit ironic given its complete and utter disappearance from the public eye these days.

But what set The Drew Carey show apart from all the other sitcoms, and really makes it a show totally worth revisiting even today, is not only how utterly progressive it was, but also just how grandiosely theatrical it was. Nowadays, live action shows have musical numbers all the time, but back then – especially on a half hour sitcom – that simply wasn’t the case, and The Drew Carey didn’t just do this once or twice, they did this so regularly that it became a heavily relied upon staple of the show itself. Full on dance sequences, bizarre fantasy sequences, and in one instance Drew watching a roasted Chicken lap dance before dousing itself in gravy in a ridiculously sensual manner. This show was, pardon the expression, of the ****ing hook, dude.

If I had to compare The Drew Carey show to a more recent series, I think the best one would be Community, which aired on NBC (and Yahoo Screen for its last season). Both really broke the wall of what was regularly accepted in a sitcom, and often toyed with conventional aspects of the genre, sometimes going fully off book entirely and dipping into a whole new genre altogether for an episode or so. Sure, Drew Carey doesn’t take place in a bizarre community college, but where he works – at least for the majority of the series – certainly has a very Greendale feel to it, especially in the sense of his most famous boss, Nigel Wick, played by the ever hilarious and overly talented Craig Ferguson. Drew Carey show also did lots of live tapings with gimmicks such as asking the audience what was wrong with the episode, or forcing their stars to change lines mid scene in improv style. It was an incredibly creative show that often pushed the limits of what could be done in the sitcom style, and for that it really deserves far more recognition than it gets, quite honestly.

But if anytime in the show was the high point, Seasons 3-7 are definitely it. And then, as with many shows, things went steadily downhill, and quite fast. Despite it at one point being ranked among the top 30 programs with critical acclaim to its name, ratings sharply declined in the final two seasons, and the show ultimately – much as it pains me to say a negative thing about it – ends a mere husk of what it once resembled.

Still, even with that poor mark at the tail end of it, a show as once heavily watched and well liked as Drew Carey shouldn’t have been fully abandoned, right? How often does a genuine hit series simply vanish into nothing? It’s a rarity, definitely, but it happened, and really, it happened because of all the music used throughout the show. Not only did the series change theme songs 3 separate times, ultimately going with the bands President of the United state’s song “Cleveland Rocks”, and it easily its most memorable of the bunch, but between the musical numbers and just all the songs used in the show itself, it became basically impossible to license beyond the first season. This mean it also cannot be streamed, and really the only place to see it is in reruns on random channels like Laff, and that’s only started happening in the last few years, mind you, and sadly has since been dropped from Laff’s lineup as of fall 2019.

Again, I reiterate, nobody really thought ahead.

Despite the show being the first series to ever be simulcast, despite it being fairly modern even for its time, nobody ever really thought ahead to the concept of home video release, and the licensing that that would entail. Hell, Warner Bros themselves have stated openly that the reason the show hasn’t been released on DVD beyond its inaugural season (and a now out of print favorite episodes DVD), and is also unlikely to ever stream anywhere, is because of the issues regarding the music licensing. And so, because of a random outdated issue, an issue that Daria was at least capable of overcoming because they didn’t use music the same way and thus was easier to fix for release, The Drew Carey Show has basically been exiled to television limbo, only to air in occasional reruns and perhaps less than legal streaming options.