Streamland Rocks: 'The Drew Carey Show' Is Finally Streaming
Another streaming white whale has been conquered
Cleveland rocks, especially when the music it wants to play is intact. There’s a moon over Parma as for the first time, all nine seasons of the ABC comedy The Drew Carey Show has been made available for streaming, debuting on the ad-supported platform Plex.
Created by series star and current The Price Is Right host Carey and Roseanne creator Bruce Helford, the multi-camera sitcom premiered Sept. 13, 1995, running for those 9 seasons and 233 episodes until September 8, 2004, ending up largely a summer burnoff for those final two seasons. It revolved around the life of “everyman” Drew Carey, who worked at the Winfred-Louder department store for the first seven seasons. The ensemble included Diedrich Bader and Ryan Stiles as Oswald Lee Harvey and Lewis Kiniski, Drew’s best friends, Christa Miller as Drew’s on-again/off-again girlfriend, Kate, eventually leaving for Scrubs, Kathy Kinney as Drew’s coworker, Mimi Bobeck, and a pre-Late Late Show Craig Ferguson as Drew’s boss, Nigel Wick. Later cast members included John Caroll Lynch as Drew’s brother, Steve, who would become Mimi’s husband, and Cynthia Watros as Drew’s girlfriend, Kellie Newmark. It is in its proper aspect ratio.
Carey lamented to TV Insider in June about the series’s growing notorious absence that “It’s not in syndication… because of music rights and stuff. We’re going to try to change that around and get it back out there…. It’s pretty funny, and a lot of it’s kind of timeless. It was weird, [too]. [The cast and creators] were all Mad Magazine fans and stuff, so we weren’t afraid to go bananas.” Linear syndication, at least for the last decade, hasn’t actually been a problem, as the series has gone from Laff to RewindTV to its current Antenna TV home. According to Zach Wilson, who hosts the Random Access Television podcast, it has “most of all the music”, and the season two episode “New York and Queens” which pits The Rocky Horror Picture Show against The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert armed with their respective songs has all of the ones originally featured. There is a clip show of musical numbers missing however.
In the years since The Drew Carey Show ended and subsequently taking over The Price is Right, Carey largely has not been acting as anyone but himself, save for an episode of NCIS and as “Mr. Green” in an episode of Bader’s later ABC series American Housewife. That 2019 episode, “Bigger Kids, Bigger Problems” served as a broader Drew Carey Show reunion with Kinney and Stiles also guest starring, as part of a “Cast From The Past” stunt decidedly rare in today’s television landscape. It is currently his last scripted character appearance.
Sources: Will Harris, Zach Wilson, TVLine