The Good

A funny show that took the office sitcom to new heights.

The Bad

No commentary tracks from Drew Carey? Come on, Warner Bros.! Come on, Drew!

Set in Cleveland, The Drew Carey Show follows Drew and his television friends Oswald, Lewis and Kate as they live their lives the best they know how. Drew is a middle manager at a department store and in the first episode of this four disc set he meets Mimi who only seems to compound his problems. As a majority of this show focuses on Drew at work, doing and not doing his job, we get to see how this character is perceived by the co-workers that he has surrounding him. We also get taken into Drew's home life where it seems he and his friends can't help but get into trouble. Whether it's brewing beer, wondering if he should have devoted his life to God, fending off a liaison from his past or simply putting up with Mimi's angry rantings, Drew and the gang do their level best to deliver full throttle on the laugh factor.

The Drew Carey Show: The Complete First Season is filled with 22 episodes of energized comedy. It is amazing how comfortable in their roles all the characters seem (considering this is only the first season), and even more impressive is how the comedic stakes seem to be raised episode after episode.

Features

Life Inside A Cubicle

Bruce Helford and Drew Carey, the creators of this show, sit back and take us through it's journey to the small screen. Helford talks about seeing Carey on TV and thinking that he could be a star, and how Drew's job on the show is probably similar to what he would have done in life had he not been a stand up comic. In addition to this we also get anecdotes from other cast members. They discuss how they got their parts, what it was like working on the show, and what the atmosphere was like on the set from day to day. Helford and Carey also discuss creating stories for Drew and how they came up with the character of Mimi. All in all, there's some pretty enlightening stuff but it may not fully satisfy the most rabid of fans.

1-900-MIMI

This is a spoof of the 900 hundred numbers that seem to be quite prevalent (and are still around) from the mid-1990s. Basically, it positions the character of Mimi as a sex object. Only through the magic of Hollywood could something like this be pulled off. Definitely check out this supplemental feature.

Video

Standard Version presented in a format preserving the aspect ratio of it's original television exhibition. I expected these things to be sharper. They all seemed to have sort of a fuzzy look and in a lot of ways they didn't seem that much better than how they looked on TV. Maybe I am expecting too much from the compression process but so many shows, especially older shows, really benefit from how they are compressed. Everything here seems like it's been given too much room to breath and thus sort of suffered because of it. I didn't notice any hits or other kind of dirt on the picture, so it seems like Warner Bros. has done something of a clean up job.

Audio

Dolby Digital. English - Stereo. The audio here was good. I found that I had to set my sound levels about halfway up on my TV, but overall everything seemed to play well. This being a sitcom the audio is mainly here to serve the dialogue. There isn't too much to say about the sound, they haven't really utilized it to get inside the characters heads, but everything I heard was fine. Also, what was leveled for one disc also carries over to the other discs in this collection.

Package

Drew and the cast are featured on this front cover which utilizes a lot of the artwork and fonts from the show against a green background. The back cover of this DVD gives us Drew with his pants off in addition to some other images from this show. There is a well written description of what The Drew Carey Show: The Complete First Season is about, a Special Features listing, a cast list and system specs. All four discs are stored in 2 slim cases with episode listings, airdates and descriptions written all over them.

Final Word

One thing that has always made me laugh about Drew Carey is that his comedy seems effortless. It is as if he simply exists and funny things happen to him. Well, this is how I used to think anyway. What I have come to realize is that it isn't so much the situations, but Drew Carey's offhanded comments to them. This is all made funnier by the fact that Drew looks so normal, one doesn't expect the remarks he makes to come out of his mouth. Also, he seems to be making fun of people in a way that they don't even comprehend that they are being insulted. Add to this that he has friends who seem to both understand and expect that kind of behavior from him, and suddenly this show's chemistry becomes all too clear. Filled with solid comic actors working off very well written material (that Drew himself had a hand in fashioning), it isn't surprising at all that this show ran for 9 years.

I have heard some scuttlebutt online that The Drew Carey Show sort of lost something over the years. That it really didn't hold up that well in the later seasons. While nothing in this business really surprises me, I hope Warner Bros. makes good on releasing every season so that I can see if this show, which is really well done in this first season set, does lose its way in it's twilight years.

The Drew Carey Show was released .