In its 8th season The Drew Carey Show underwent a significant rebranding, so to say. The Winford-Lauder store is no more, and, correspondingly Drew no longer works as a personnel specialist. He scrapes by between jobs for a while, during which time has to sell his car, until she lands at one of the early dotcoms, a company called NeverEndingStore.com, which is a sort of online supermarket, where he starts working as an internal expedite analyst. For a few months he has no idea what the job is about (not even what the name means), but eventually manages to refocus. Kate finds herself a husband while visiting New York, and then moves with him to Guam; she is only casted in the first couple of episodes, and is absent for the rest of the season – so much so, she never gets mentioned anymore, even when it comes to important events. In her stead a young girl named Kelly becomes a part of the gang; Kelly is a little younger than Drew, who used to babysit her back in the day (as well as his brother Steve). After a nasty divorce, she finds herself lost in life, and Drew offers her a place to stay until she could get back on her feet; she takes a job in the Warsaw tavern as a waitress. Kate’s marriage strikes Drew so bad, he decides that he should find himself a wife as well; at that, he decides to solve all the technical issues of the process (such as the venue, the invitations, the band, etc.), and only after that find a bride. That search becomes an obsession of his: he goes through several dozens of girlfriends, most of them shown in passing, and the most notable being Amy, who liked to wear squirrel costume during sex; Robin, one of Larry’s matches; Dom, a girl Drew met on the bus; Elaine, a lesbian daughter of the priest, and, finally, Lily from New Orleans, who moves to Seattle for Drew and even goes as far as the wedding. Simultaneously with the bridal search both Kelly and Drew gradually realize their feelings for each other, but never do anything about them. Oswald blows the nursing test and eventually gets employed at Drew’s company as a delivery guy. Lewis remains pretty much as he was. Steve cheats on Mimi, who throws him out of the house; it takes them a while to reconcile, but they got there in the end. Mimi (who also works at the same company Drew does) switches the heat of her anger from Drew to Traylor, the leading designer of the company, who behaves all posh and arrogant. Also, Drew almost becomes the star of the Superbowl ad, but instead becomes a meme Puking Drew; he gets an old Rolls-Roys as a gift, and almost breaks off with Lewis over it; he makes sort of friends with the bus driver; almost loses Speedy to a cancer patient; and undergoes a colonoscopy. Mr. Wich appears a few times, but stops being a major part of the cast. There were no live episodes, nor April Fools’ ones; all the episodes shown were within the main narrative line.
This is a pretty interesting season, maybe of the most notable so far. First of all, it is very commendable how the authors handled the inevitable change – instead of trying to mask it they embraced the concept of change, and overpowered the losses (such as Christa Miller’s departure) with even bigger, flashier alterations. I have to say, this works pretty well, especially considering that the replacement (Cynthia Watros as Kelly) was more than successful, and that the humor was also pretty great. The reflection of the transformed reality, in particular, all the Internet stuff, such the dotcoms and the programming, must have been rather original back in 2002, and surely seems refreshing even now – that is, if comparing the show to its coevals.
The execution is good; there was no lasting effect of the losses on the quality of the show in general. Now I’m actually looking forward to seeing how they went off – I hope it was at least as decent as was this season.
Year: 2002-2003
Created by: Drew Carey and Bruce Helford
Directed by: Gerry Cohen, Bob Koherr, Sam Simon, Tommy Thompson, Shelley Jensen, Drew Carey
Written by: Mike Teverbaugh and Linda Teverbaugh, Dave Caplan, Bruce Rasmussen, Dan O’Keefe, Les Firestein, Jana Hunter and Mitch Hunter, Julie Ann Larson, Terry Mulroy, Ed Lee, Adam Faberman, Stacey Pulwer, Kristen Marvin, John N. Huss, Clay Graham
Performed by: Drew Carey, Diedrich Bader, Kathy Kinney, Ryan Stiles, Christa Miller, Craig Ferguson, John Carroll Lynch, Cynthia Watros, Tim O’Rourke, Ian Gomez, Kate Walsh, Bill Cobbs, Jonathan Mangum, Kyle Howard, Kaitlin Olson, Speedy, Marion Ross, Dakota and Ryan Williams, Henry Rollins, Amy Farrington
Time: 9h15m (a. 26 episodes)
Entertaining quality: 5- out of 5
Art quality: 4+ out of 5
Links: (wiki)
®shoomow, 2018
Cinegmatic 