Friday , March 29 2024

Drew’s Odd Departure

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.

But anyway:

    This would seem to be a deal ripe for a renegotiation: ABC agrees to pay Carey and Warner Bros. a tidy sum to go away, and forget the final season.

    Nobody at ABC or Warner Bros. would talk about whether that idea had even been broached. There’s probably a financial incentive for Warner to continue production since the show is popular in syndication – where the real money is made in television – and this just gives them more episodes to sell.

    So it means the final season of “The Drew Carey Show” is produced in a virtual vacuum. Few people knew when, or if, the episodes would make it on the air.

    It’s still a lucrative vacuum: Carey reportedly made $600,000 to $750,000 an episode.

    ….Producers had a little fun, took some chances. Parts of some episodes were shot in a single-camera format, without an audience, instead of the three-camera format before a live audience seen on most sitcoms.

    Longtime fans will enjoy watching the journey taken by some of the characters during the final season. Carey must decide whether or not to marry his pregnant girlfriend in the show’s final episode.

    ….The end had to be bittersweet, particularly compared to this week at NBC, where the “Friends” cast is exiting with a paroxysm of national mourning and $2 million-a-pop commercial spots.

    “It was strange,” Simon said. “It was really strange.” [AP]

The show isn’t even listed on the ABC site.

About Eric Olsen

Career media professional and serial entrepreneur Eric Olsen flung himself into the paranormal world in 2012, creating the America's Most Haunted brand and co-authoring the award-winning America's Most Haunted book, published by Berkley/Penguin in Sept, 2014. Olsen is co-host of the nationally syndicated broadcast and Internet radio talk show After Hours AM; his entertaining and informative America's Most Haunted website and social media outlets are must-reads: Twitter@amhaunted, Facebook.com/amhaunted, Pinterest America's Most Haunted. Olsen is also guitarist/singer for popular and wildly eclectic Cleveland cover band The Props.

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