Remember Drew Carey? Until recently he was a superstar, the pride of Cleveland, the focal point of two ABC shows, the coolest dwid around. His show is about to enter its final season - in the summer:

The finale of "The Drew Carey Show" is expected to air on ABC sometime this summer.

....Smart and stylish - a blue-collar comedy set in Cleveland where the principals would occasionally break out into a show tune - Carey's show once was one of ABC's crown jewels. In the 1996-97 season, it averaged 17 million viewers, the first of three straight years in Nielsen Media Research's top 20.

The show's popularity was fading in 2001, but it still seemed savvy when ABC reached a deal with Warner Bros. Television, the show's producers, to keep it on the air through 2004.

Then the bottom fell out.

It's not clear whether viewers simply tired of the amiable, bespectacled comedian. Between his own show and "Whose Line is it Anyway?" he logged a lot of face time on the network.

I think this is the real problem - Carey is far too much of an anti-charisma figure to be in front of the public that much. He always looked like he was falling asleep on Whose Line Is It Anyway.

Or they may simply have tired of trying to find "The Drew Carey Show." The program premiered on Wednesday nights, an evening where it has inhabited four separate time slots. It's also been shown regularly on Tuesdays. And Thursdays. And Fridays. And Mondays.

By the middle of last season, ABC took it off the air, and burned off many of the show's episodes during the summer.

ABC didn't even bother putting it on this season. New episodes will premiere on June 2, and the network will show two first-run episodes a week during the summer - the television equivalent of an afterthought.

Of course it isn't the "afterthought" it used to be, what with reality shows coming and going year round and Fox bragging about "revolutionizing" TV by staring the new fall schedule - in June.