The Drew Carey Show (1995-2004)

Starring: Drew Carey, Kathy Kinney, Christa Miller, Ryan Stiles, Diedrich Bader, Craig Ferguson, Cynthia Watros, and John Carroll Lynch
Grade: A

You know when you see those clickbait articles on your news feed with titles like “Greatest Sitcoms of All Time Ranked” and you know it’s going to piss you off, but you click on it anyway? Well, on all of these lists, I have never seen anyone mention the greatness of The Drew Carey Show.

To this day, very few sitcoms are as hilarious as this one. When speaking of my personal favorites, Drew Carey sits firmly in the same class as critical darlings Friends and Seinfeld. The humor, the cast and their chemistry, the outrageous storylines, and everything in-between, this show was fantastic and never got boring.

Playing a fictionalized version of himself, Drew Carey is the everyman we all know and love. He goes to work every day in the office of department store Winfred-Louder. There, he’s the Assistant Director of Personnel and earns a decent living. However, he’s shit on by everyone and is never appreciated for his work. It starts with whoever is in charge. The disrespect could be from the mostly unseen Mr. Bell (Kevin Pollack) in Season One, to Mr. Nigel Wick (Ferguson) for a majority of the show’s run, to the higher-up officials who own the company and come after Drew and Wick at times, or even co-workers like that assclown Larry Almada (Ian Gomez). As we know though, most of the abuse comes from Drew’s nemesis, evil secretary Mimi Bobek (Kinney). She brings out the worst in Drew and leads him on the verge of a breakdown several times throughout the show. Besides his odd arrangements at work that tend to get crazier as time moves on, he’s helped every step of the way by his very close group of friends who have been with him since grade school. After work, they hang out and get drunk at the local Warsaw Tavern. All along the while, Drew regularly purses relationships and finds himself in weird situations that no other normal sitcom star should ever find themselves in. Though Carey isn’t the greatest of leading men in Season One, he does win us over in short order as he loosens up in the season and works out the kinks of the performance. Early in Season Two, you get accustomed to Drew’s style, and you start to realize how funny he actually is, as well as his friends who compliment him perfectly.

It starts with the absolutely hysterical duo of the certifiably insane Lewis (Stiles) and the moronic Oswald (Bader). Imagine the Three Stooges, but there’s two of them, and they’re both Curly. They start out as a bumbling duo that are there to have fun but once they settle into the roles of becoming increasingly bizarre (Lewis) and stupid as all hell (Oswald), the show is flat-out addicting. These two are responsible for some of the funniest lines/moments from episode to episode and steal the show on a regular basis. When the show is in its prime (from Seasons Two to Seven), these two will have you cackling with their one-liners and side quests that get crazier and crazier. I still laugh thinking about how when they used the insurance money from Drew’s “death” to make their own album (Drew and the Motorcycle).

Of course, there’s also the unforgettable Kathy Kinney as the hateful antagonist, and eventually sister-in-law once she marries Drew’s cross-dressing brother Steve (Lynch) later in the show, Mimi Bobek. Her clown makeup and awful personality make her the perfect foil for EVERYONE. She’s a fighter, she’s mean, nasty, vindictive, vengeful, and is kind of a genius. Throughout the show’s run, she makes it her personal mission to mess with Drew, and they have a prank war to the very end because of their hatred for one another, reaching levels of Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner in terms of ridiculousness. For example, Mimi admits to sending threatening letters to the President in Drew’s name and even manages to send him to China without a passport (The High Road to China). Though Drew gets his revenge on Mimi and takes things much more personally because Mimi always goes too far, she always finds a way to win in the end (unless they come to a temporary ceasefire because of work-related things, or Steve getting between them).

As I mentioned before, Drew does go through quite a few bosses during his time at work, but none were better than the cartoonishly evil (but hilarious) Mr. Wick who takes over from Mr. Bell after Season One, giving Drew the stupidest assignments imaginable for a department store. He’s an over-the-top Englishman, he’s crude, and can be devious. It’s later revealed he has a coke problem too (Golden Boy). On top of that, a staple of the character is his penchant for firing several unknown characters named “Johnson” in numerous episodes, and it’s funny every time. It’s the role that made Craig Ferguson a star and for that reason alone, I will always love this show. In the last couple of seasons, Winfred-Louder is bought by the Neverending Store, an online retail company. Despite this radical change in the final two seasons, the relatively normal and business-orientated Scott (Jonathan Mangum) and his brother Evan (Kyle Howard) who’s all about peace and love, do a decent job at providing a nice change of pace for the show. Plus, they’re much nicer towards Drew. When we see how much abuse our protagonist takes from beginning to end, we actually kind of enjoy how they give Drew some opportunities and act so much better towards him. Obviously, they aren’t nearly as funny as someone like Mr. Wick, but when you get that far into the show, you have to cut Drew some slack here and there to give him a reason to stay with the company. It’s a different vibe, but I thought it worked.

Lastly, there’s Kate O’Brien (Miller).

We saved the best for last.

Kate is one of the most underrated female sitcom characters ever and becomes the second most important person in the show in short order. She’s optimistic, aggressive, a bit slutty (which the guys never forget to bring up) and is very fun to be around. She’s the female that completes any kind of male-dominant friend group. Now, in any friend group with one or two women, the men are bound to fall in love with her. They’ve been friends since they were kids, so it does make sense. During the course of her run on the show, she almost gets married to Oswald and later Drew himself, but both potential marriages fall apart because of Kate getting cold feet and realizing Oswald isn’t the one (My Best Friend’s Wedding) and her not wanting kids and Drew wanting the opposite. Honestly, she was the glue that held the show together. With her funny delivery, perfect chemistry with the core of the cast, and effortless attractiveness, Christa Miller’s Kate ranks right up there with Jennifer Aniston’s Rachel as golden tier female sitcom characters. Though the best years of the show leave when Kate exits in Season Eight, Cynthia Watros enters as Kellie and makes the transition seamlessly with her bubbly personality. She’s sweet and lovable and brings a different energy into the cast that won me over quicker than I thought, especially because I was such a big fan of Kate and didn’t think anyone could replace her.

This was surprising because making a replacement that late into a show’s run is usually a death sentence for a sitcom, but I thought Kellie was a welcomed addition. In fact, I wish in hindsight she was able to interact with Kate more before she left.

The reason that Christa Miller’s leaving is pointed to as the moment the show fell apart isn’t true. Cynthia Watros was good. The problem was that the show’s decline in quality was obvious leading into Season Eight. When Kate leaves, we know we’ll never get the Kate/Drew relationship back on track, and I think it was tough for some. Though I have praised the outrageousness of the content of The Drew Carey Show time and time again, I can’t help but acknowledge that they pushed the envelope so far with so many different storylines to keep things fresh and exciting for the Drew Carey character, they wrote themselves into a corner with his failure regarding relationships. For me, the decline began with the Season Finale of Season Six (Bananas: Parts I & II). It was a crazy way to end the season and does fit the over-the-top mold of where The Drew Carey Show goes on a regular basis, but I felt like this pushed the protagonist too far, and it was hard for the character to recover. I don’t mean this from an entertainment aspect though because the show is always entertaining. Here, I’m talking about the mental stability of our lead character.

He finally gets a promotion, but he loses his ever-loving mind because of the stress? No! Why can’t he win just once?!

Though Season Seven is still very funny, the backlash from Drew getting out of the mental institution is detrimental to the character and has lasting effects on everyone involved. I understand the running joke of how quickly Drew gets in and out of marriages, but it was hard for the character to recover getting married to Nicki’s (Kate Walsh) horrible self while getting married to Kate at the same time. Kate was his true love, and we all knew it. Why would he fall for Nicki’s bullshit again? I just don’t see how a friendship and love as close as Drew’s and Kate’s could recover after this story arc. The episode “When Wives Collide” was such a game changer because for the first time, Drew screws up his own life by his own volition. He has no one to blame but himself, but there’s no reason as to why he would make these clearly illogical decisions. It makes you want to scream at him, “What the fuck is wrong with you?! Think about what you’re doing!”. The mental institution move could be blamed for his poor life choices, but marriage is marriage. He did that. The characters don’t give him a pass, and neither should we. How Nicki managed to weasel herself back into Drew’s life when Drew finally got Kate never made sense to me, and his handling of the situation was next-level awful.

After this, the decline began in my eyes, and the relationship between Drew and Kate never got back to what it was. How could it, right? I’ve never seen such a colossal fuck-up from a main character in my life! He loses Kate, and eventually, it leads to her marrying a pilot and moving to Guam in Season Eight, never to be seen from again. I know Christa Miller decided to leave to work on Scrubs and other projects but when you’re looking at it in terms of the narrative, her story was over. She had nowhere else to go with the bachelor crew of Drew, Oswald, and Lewis. Drew messed up so badly, she was on borrowed time from then on out, and the writers seemed to phone it in regarding her character as well. As I mentioned before, I still liked Kellie, the Neverending Store taking over, and how the last two seasons played out, but the show’s quality was nowhere near the hilariously fantastic prime the show had. The show never stopped being funny, but they balanced everything story-wise very well with the hijinks in the five-season prime it had. In the midst of Season Seven, the stories finally took a hit, and it never reached the heights it did before, contributing to the show’s decline.

Going along with this, the series finale bothered me for a couple of reasons. I hated that Kate couldn’t make an appearance. Considering how important she was to the Drew character and how close they were for a majority of their lives, I just can’t see her missing such an important moment in Drew’s life like him having a baby. Don’t tell me “There were scheduling conflicts”. A cameo isn’t impossible. Also, I hated how they break character for the last couple of minutes of the show. The final sequence, though bittersweet, seemed like it would fit better as a bonus section for the DVD box set (which still hasn’t come out by the way).

I loved the show for its humor and its eccentricities and that’s why it will always be a personal favorite of mine. However, when you look at the show as a whole, it could never get a perfect grade because of basic story faults like Drew never having anything good happening to him and when something good does happen, it only lasts for a moment until something screws it up. It gets exhausting. We never see Mimi going to prison even though a lot of things she did, including drugging Drew and sending him to China without a passport, would land her there. For some reason, they try to make her a sympathetic character after her failed marriage to Steve and her trying to be a single mother, but she did way too much over the years for me to feel bad for her at all. This includes when her house burnt down which I felt was karma at its finest. Look, I understand it’s still a TV show, but you have to meet me halfway on some of these things. Drew constantly gets screwed, and he never seemed to catch a break. It gets tiresome, despite how funny the show is. It gets to the point where you wonder how he didn’t end up in the mental institution sooner.

People don’t talk about this a lot, but Drew’s relationships and constant accidental marriages and divorces easily beat Ross from Friends. Drew Carey is actually deserving of “The Divorcer” mantle. It becomes a very entertaining and unpredictable part of the character, and it’s enjoyable to a point (with the Kate/Nicki storyline being the last straw as I mentioned before). However, I do have an issue with the believability of Drew dating so many hot girls during the course of the show. Come on Drew, there’s no way you’re pulling a Lisa (Katy Selverstone). Lastly, when the show moved to a single camera format for its final season, it just changes the show. It loses the feel of the older episodes and felt too movie-like and emotional. For these many reasons, I still can’t rate this personal favorite of mine an “A+“, and it kills me.

Besides those gripes, a highly underrated aspect of the show is its innovations. Drew would constantly play with the sitcom format and do things in certain episodes that no one else was doing at the time and haven’t done since. This includes breaking the fourth wall, doing song and dance numbers that are actually cool and catchy (Drew and Kate Boink, New York and Queens), an episode where they have a feud with the actual devil (The Devil, You Say), an encounter with Daffy Duck (My Best Friend’s Wedding), episodes where the audience would have to guess what was aesthetically wrong in frames, and it turned into a contest for fans (What’s Wrong With This Episode? and its sequel episodes), and turning an episode into a live improv show featuring the guys from Who’s Line is it Anyway? while weaving in and out of character, which was even funnier when the regular actors would break and laugh (Drew Live and its sequel episodes). I still haven’t seen anything like this in a sitcom since. Then, there was the back-to-school sketch episode that had nothing to do with the canon of the show (Drew Carey’s Back-to-School Rock ‘n’ Roll Comedy Hour Parts 1 & 2), an episode where each character is critiqued by Bob Costas and company like an episode of Monday Night Football (Tracy Bowl), a fantastic episode where a points system would pop up on the screen anytime Drew and Oswald would see if they match well with their girlfriends (The Engagement), and the other non-canon episode where the gang does everything humanly possible to win an Emmy (A Very Special Drew).

Additionally, there were also little things like an episode where Mimi and Mr. Wick talk throughout the entire theme song and point at the title of the show to reference Drew being their target. For the “Drew’s in a Coma” storyline (and the episode right after entitled “Drew and the Baby“), they switched the theme song twice in two episodes to accommodate, not to mention all the times they changed the theme song for the show and remixed them a bunch of different times in the last few seasons. There was even a time in the opening dream sequence that changed to an alien theme because during said sequence, everyone turned into aliens that Drew had to kill (Drew and the Singles Union).

*Catches breath*

Now, in terms of favorite episodes, I have a lot of them because again, this is easily one of my favorite shows ever. The aforementioned story arc of Drew being in a coma was great (Drew’s in a Coma), Drew starting a singles club in protest (Drew and the Singles Union), Larry having an affair with Mrs. Louder (Strange Bedfellows), Drew starting to date Nicki (Misery Loves Mimi), the guys recreating The Full Monty (The Dog and Pony Show), Oswald getting breast implants in exchange for $10,000 (Sexual Perversity in Cleveland), Winfred-Louder trying to open a new shopping mall in Drew’s neighborhood and directly through his house and they try to pressure him to sell (A House Divided, A House Reunited), Drew, Oswald, and Lewis all pursuing the same girl (Three Guys, a Girl and a B-Story), and Drew going back and forth on whether to stop the demolition of Winfred-Louder (Brotherhood of Man). On top of that, there’s the time when a long-serving board member makes a racially charged speech and Drew has to fix the PR mess (Drew and the Racial Tension Play), Mr. Wick coming up with a scam marriage to Drew to avoid getting deported (Drew and the Trail Scouts, Drew and Kate Become Friends), Lewis and Oswald bringing in a live bear to promote Buzz Beer at a convention (Buzzie Wuzzie Liked His Beer), Drew renting out a room to a gay couple (Hotel Drew), a website publishing a list of the biggest internet porn users and all the main characters on the show are on it (Look Mom, One Hand!), a karaoke contest (What’s Love Got to Do With It?), Drew meets Lily (Drew Answers the Belle), Drew getting stalked by Earl (Drew and the Unstable Element), the gang lying to an insurance adjuster to help Mimi get a new house (Liar, Liar, House on Fire), and Drew and Kellie finding how different they are on the political sides of things (Sleeping with the Enemy).

Let’s also give Drew Carey credit for making Cleveland look like a livable city, a task thought to be impossible. This is mostly attributed to the legendary theme song. The theme that preceded it may not have much to do with Cleveland, but it’s also an absolute banger.

Despite its story problems I can’t get over, I can’t explain enough how entertaining this show is. If you got a firestick or something, or you have access to one of those illegal websites that gives your computer a bunch of viruses, watch it. It’s criminally underrated. It’s too bad this show isn’t shown on every channel like Friends because newfound popularity would instantly grow for this show. It’s an innovative and classic 90s sitcom, and I’m annoyed (and shocked) as to why it doesn’t have a much bigger legacy. It’s lack of a distributor has definitely hurt it. It’s not on any streaming sites nor does it have a DVD collection. There’s also the fact that the network treated the show like shit in its last couple of seasons and even aired the final season’s episodes out of order! Can you imagine treating a long-tenured show like that this badly towards the end? This is why it’s not remembered as fondly, and it’s totally unfair.

Regardless, it’s hysterical. You won’t regret watching it. The first season is pretty normal, but it gets progressively quirkier and more hilarious as the show goes on. You start to become entrenched in the show’s wackiness by Season Three and by then, I guarantee you’ll find yourself quoting the show on the daily. I know I do. The main cast is funny and lovable, and the episodes get progressively zanier as the show continues, presumably because the writers (and Drew himself) wanted to keep things fresh. It gets ridiculous, but it stays hilarious. Trust me on this. Watch The Drew Carey Show! It’s one of the best sitcoms of the 1990s and early 2000s.