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, the show abandoned the idea of formulaic plots to take things in its own direction, focusing on a man who is always on the verge of a mid-life crisis and who experiences real existential dread at his situation in life, what it all means and whether or not he'd be happier if he'd just leap off a bridge and end it all already.
Like Seinfeld, the show never really delved into the same formulaic plots about Superbowl parties and so on, and really went in a whole new direction creating its own, new concepts for great TV stories. It's about the existential dread, the fear you feel when you're anywhere between thirty and fifty and wondering why your life didn't shape up the way you wanted it to. It's really interesting, and a little deeper than the usual Football Widow jokes you see in most sitcoms.
By the final season, Carey was making somewhere around a million bones an episode, but... The ratings started to slip. Drew Carey had a strong and loyal following, but it just wasn't enough to keep the show on the air any longer. Sadly, the show is not syndicated anywhere in the US right now, nor have they ever released anything beyond the first season on DVD, so watching online is probably the only way to enjoy it anymore.
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, 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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