DVD Review: Samantha Who? - The Complete First Season

Although Samantha Newly (Christina Applegate) laments that “old me really screwed new me over,” in ABC’s hit sitcom, Samantha Who?, when it came to the reception her show received, the former Married With Children star couldn’t have been more wrong.

For nearly half of Who’s fifteen-episode initial season, Applegate’s sunny comedy (which she also produces) became the “highest-rated freshman sitcom of the 2007-2008 TV season” additionally dethroning Charlie Sheen’s two-year title holding CBS comedy Two and a Half Men as the highest rated sitcom for that exact same period.

Not too shabby for a series that took the daring and usually melodramatic topic of retrograde amnesia as the platform for their Pygmalion-like comedy. In the pilot episode of Samantha Who?, we find the formerly “Bad Samantha” awakening after an eight-day coma from being hit by a car. However, after the balloons and flowers have lost their charm, she becomes acquainted with her villainous old life. And upon realizing that it’s time to change her ways and become “New Samantha," suddenly her character’s name Samantha Newly becomes all the more apt as Applegate’s heroine decides to turn over a new leaf and rectify past mistakes.

Samantha Who? Promo

Although she’s primarily both her own Eliza Doolittle and Professor Higgins, Samantha has a great support system all too eager to help steer her in, if not the right direction, then down whichever direction they decide to pursue. After her mother makes peace with the fact that she won’t be able to win an Extreme Home Makeover upon Samantha’s awakening and her dad gives her his business card as a means of introducing himself, Samantha tries to mend fences with the parents she hadn’t spoken with in two years, Regina and Howard Newly (played by a hilarious Jean Smart and Kevin Dunn). And while it’s Smart who steals every scene she’s in, in one particularly humorous episode and the desire to bond with her outdoorsman father, Samantha decides to view the misnamed film The Deer Hunter, later prompting Samantha to ask, “Have you heard of Vietnam? I mean, do people know about that?”

Additionally, she also shares a close paternal/mentor relationship with her aspiring screenwriter doorman Frank (Tim Russ) who always offers her the perfect piece of advice or quote, despite his wish to stay out of her life. However Sam has the most trouble dealing with the unexpected sparks that fly as she strives to establish new boundaries with her former photographer boyfriend Todd (Barry Watson) that get much more difficult when he not only reciprocates her feelings but has begun seeing an unstable, clingy woman named Chloe (Kiele Sanchez).

Article Author: Jen Johans

Jen is a life-long film buff frequently dubbed a "Walking Movie Encyclopedia.” While earning a degree in Film Studies, she joined AFI and IFP. A three-time national award-winning writer, Jen also runs her site Film Intuition as well as its Review …

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