The popular 90s ABC sitcom The Drew Carey Show has made it’s way to DVD with the long-awaited The Drew Carey Show: The Complete Series and our friends at Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment have sent Cherry the Geek TV a copy for review.
Long-delayed, mainly due to music rights issues, the series, which was previously released as individual seasons with music replacements, is now available in a box set with MOST of the music issues resolved, BUT, and this is a big one, the set is STILL missing four musical episodes–“Drew’s Dance Party Special”, “Drew Carey’s Back-to-School Rock ‘n’ Roll Comedy Hour Parts 1 + 2”, and “What’s Love Got to Do with It?”. Pesky music rights. Hence, the asterisk after the title on the box art. It’s the complete series–minus four episodes.
The series follows Drew Carey (playing a fictionalized version of himself) as a personnel director at a Cleveland department store, navigating life with his best friends Lewis Kiniski (Ryan Stiles), Oswald Harvey (Diedrich Bader), and Kate O’Brien (Christa Miller). What made the show popular with audiences is that its characters were relatable in that they were ordinary people trying to make their way through everyday challenges– work and office issues, finding romance, and trying to share good times with friends. The show and its characters were endearing and authentic.
The video features a 4×3 presentation utilizing the show’s original 1.33:1 aspect ratio for seasons 1-6 and a 16×9 1.78:1 aspect ratio for Seasons 7-9. The video presentations look incredibly nice– generally sharp, clean and capably detailed throughout the entirety of its nine season run here and if anything the previously released first season might actually look the weakest (although still just fine). Overall, these are great standard definition video presentations that look as good as the DVD format offers and really, this is just a soundstage-shot sitcom that doesn’t really require much more.
In terms of audio, the DVD release includes a 192 kbps 2.0 channel Dolby Digital stereo soundtrack on all episodes. These stereo soundtracks are pretty rewarding in their own right and they offer clean, sharp and well balanced audio presentations for every episode included within. Dialogue is clean and crisp, while background noise and effects never falter or disappoint. Overall, these are solid 2.0 Dolby Digital soundtracks that do their job very well in nearly every respect and shouldn’t disappoint.
There is only one special feature– the previously released 19-minute featurette “Life Inside the Cubicle.” Readers know that we are big on bonus features and so while this featurette is good in terms of quality, the lack of anything new is somewhat disappointing.
Overall though, if you were a fan of The Drew Carey Show and just want to relive the episodes, you’ll probably enjoy the set, and who knows, if it sells well, maybe we’ll get a Blu-ray set with more bonus features and the missing musical episodes.
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