By Billie Campbell

Seinfeld is always regarded as the most innovative, and perhaps most important, television series of the nineties, but as far as sitcoms go, The Drew Carey Show certainly deserves to be listed right alongside Seinfeld. Most people don't remember the show quite as clearly as Seinfeld, but it really did make a lot of changes to how people regard the modern sitcom, and definitely deserves to go on the list next time you login to the movie download service of your choice.

It could have just been another formulaic sitcom. Many comedians, they get a TV deal so the first thing they do is create just another family sitcom. The blue collar dad, the football widow wife, the kids (usually a daughter and a son) and the wacky neighbor. The Drew Carey Show, while still being more or less based on the comedian's act, also took the sitcom in a new direction.

Like Seinfeld, the show abandoned the idea of formulaic plots to take things in its own direction, focusing on a man who is always on the verge of a mid-life crisis and who experiences real existential dread at his situation in life, what it all means and whether or not he'd be happier if he'd just leap off a bridge and end it all already.

The show also made a lot of artistic strides as a sitcom, such as the "World Keeps Turning" intro, the live episodes and various other tricks they used to keep the show fresh.

By the end of the series, Carey was making something like a million dollars an episode but, sadly, the ratings were starting to drop and the show had to be canceled, even though it did garner a loyal following who would always make sure that they were at home after work in time to watch it.

The show was really refreshing in the way that it did not focus on the same tired issues as every other show out there at the time. It wasn't the same old "Uh oh it's football season" jokes, it wasn't the son borrowing the car without asking, it was something a lot more interesting and less predictable, and this was really the rejuvenation the sitcom format needed, alongside Seinfeld, after decades of the same old stuff day in day out.

The show serves as an acknowledgement that mom, dad and the kids aren't the only people in the universe, that there are many definitions for the word family, and that the relationships between a man and his friends is every bit as important and valid as the relationship between a man and his wife and his children.

And of course, Lewis and Oswald are two of the funniest sitcom characters of all time. It's always funny when a show that's already a comedy has comic relief characters.

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