The Square Roots of This Duo’s Success

America always has room in its heart for the shlubby Everyman, and on television, the Everyman of the moment is named Drew Carey. Heavy-set, with a crew cut and horned-rim glasses, Drew works as a mid-level personnel manager at a downtown Cleveland department store, is unmarried, lives alone in his parents’ old house and spends his off-hours at a regular guys’ bar called the Warsaw, downing pitchers of beer with his pals. Sometimes he dates, but without any of that angst-filled, “Seinfeld”-ian self-involvement; when things don’t work out, he’s the guy who accepts things as they are and moves on, grabbing a sandwich and a bag of Fritos (super-sized) on his way to the living room sofa.

“I think of Drew as this ‘Marty’ character,” says “The Drew Carey Show” executive producer Clay Graham, referring to the 1955 film that starred Ernest Borgnine as a painfully shy, affable butcher. “He’s this eccentric, lonely guy, looking for love.”

Like Drew Carey the character, “Drew Carey” the show, which begins its fourth season Wednesday night at 9 on ABC, is the mensch no one notices--the hit sitcom that doesn’t get much respect. He’s the nice guy at work you ignore until your car breaks down and you suddenly need a lift home. For ABC, the show has been that lift--its ratings never through the roof, but hey, the network hasn’t exactly been cranking out hit comedies lately.

Last year, in fact, “The Drew Carey Show” was the only returning ABC series to show growth among 18- to 49-year-olds, the audience advertisers covet most. Consistently finishing in the top 20, the show averaged more than 16.5 million viewers and beat its main time-slot competition, NBC’s “3rd Rock From the Sun.” And while article after article was being written about how the cancellation of “Ellen” proved that a network couldn’t stomach a lesbian lead character, less was said about how “Ellen” couldn’t hold “Drew’s” lead-in audience at 9:30 p.m.

“If we were on NBC,” says Bruce Helford, the show’s co-creator and executive producer, “we’d be the heir apparent to ‘Seinfeld.’ ”

Asked to explain the unlikely success of “Drew,” people point to Carey’s universal appeal or note that the show works as counter-programming to the more upscale and airbrushed ensemble comedies like “Frasier” and “Friends.”

But just as integral may be the compatibility of the cast (away from the set they do improvisational comedy together every Thursday night at the Improv)and the symmetry between Carey and Helford.

“Symmetry,” on the other hand, may be too highfalutin a word to use about two guys whose idea of fun is driving to Cleveland--in the winter. It was February 1995, to be exact, when the two offbeat auteurs were writing the pilot for “Drew,” that they made their first cross-country foray.

For Helford and Carey, that entailed stopping for lots of meals at Bob Evans and Cracker Barrel and using the car phone to call in to radio talk shows. On the open road, away from L.A., Carey says, he stops biting his nails and sleeps better. Helford is simply afraid to fly.

In the summer of ‘96, the two drove around to Civil War battlefields. This time the show’s sluggish first season suggested they didn’t necessarily have to make the drive round-trip. In Texas, their rented convertible Mustang broke down (“So, you two boys work for Warner Bros.?” Carey recalls, mimicking the drawl of the woman at the auto repair shop who helped them).

While this kind of camaraderie isn’t a prerequisite for a hit sitcom (Roseanne, for one, left a trail of shell-shocked and/or fed-up executive producers in her wake), it’s not too far a leap to pin at least some of the show’s success on the fact that Helford and Carey can spend very long hours in a car together.

“Drew is very much in touch with his past and his emotions,” says Helford, who is among those who did a tour of duty running “Roseanne.” “Most stand-up comedians aren’t. There’s this wall there you can’t get through.”

“There are a lot of relationships between the executive producer and the star where they’re just working, and the shows do just fine,” Carey says. “But it’s important for me to have [a closer] relationship. I can’t just be told what to do. . . . Especially when my name’s on the box.”

In his 1997 book, “Dirty Jokes and Beer,” Carey indulges his frat-guy side (tales of his infamous taste for strippers and beer), but what ultimately comes through is the same down-to-earth likability you see on his show; there’s a very refreshing chapter, for instance, in which he explains in plain English how a sitcom really works.

“There’s no ego there,” says ABC Entertainment Chairman Stu Bloomberg, who praised Carey’s availability at the network’s annual gathering with affiliates earlier this year in Orlando, Fla. “He came on stage and said, ‘I will give every affiliate Saturday and Sunday to do special promos for every market that wants me.’ ”

But Carey knows well enough that you can give people an inch with the nice-guy stuff and they’ll take a football field. So when ABC floated the notion of moving his show to Tuesday night this year, Carey helped block the move. And in a mild show of independence from the “Drew Carey” image, he dyed his hair yellow this summer, and says that after the show’s over, “I’m not going to do anything unless it’s fun.”

Maybe, he adds, he’ll go back to Cleveland and try to become “un-famous.” But it will be even more difficult for him to become un-rich. Earlier this year, he restructured his deal with the show’s producer, Warner Bros., so that he now makes roughly $300,000 per episode--not quite the $1 million-per-episode neighborhood of “Home Improvement’s” Tim Allen, but another stratosphere all the same. Nor does that salary include his share of the syndication profits as co-creator and one of the show’s executive producers.

Helford, too, is enjoying life as a multimillionaire and one of the top show-runners in television. He’s not only running “Drew” but also developing another sitcom with former “Saturday Night Live” cast member Norm Macdonald that could arrive on ABC as early as midseason. After breaking into the business in the early 1980s writing for Gary David Goldberg on “Family Ties,” Helford rose steadily through the ranks; his resume includes the obscure (remember “Mr. Sunshine,” starring Jeffrey Tambor as a blind college professor?) and the not-so-obscure (“Roseanne” during its 1992-93 season).

In Hollywood, where sitcom leads and executive producers often get paired in arranged marriages that end in creative annulment, Carey and Helford are today regarded as an exemplary couple, a birds-of-a-feather arrangement mentioned alongside stand-up comic/executive producer teams Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David or Ray Romano and Phil Rosenthal.

When Romano was looking for a writer to develop his sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond,” he interviewed a dozen different people before settling on Rosenthal, someone who came from the same suburban Long Island world of Romano’s show.

“It’s like dating,” Rosenthal says of the year-round mating dance whereby sitcom leads and producers are brought together.

And just as in dating, little things can make all the difference. It soothed Rosenthal, for instance, that Romano wanted to meet him at Art’s Deli in Studio City and not at a place where the waiter might take 15 minutes to recite the specials.

Carey and Helford aren’t exactly Le Dome types either. Carey has a crew cut and Helford has a sort-of beard underneath his bottom lip, a few inches above trendy goatee terrain. But something a bit more important than that suggested they could do for the blue-collar Midwest what Seinfeld/David did for the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Namely, shared cultural backgrounds, an inherent understanding of the world of the working stiffs portrayed on their show.

Carey, 40, worked as a waiter for years, briefly found happiness in the Marine Corps Reserves and had so little money when he became a stand-up comedian that he kept all his worldly possessions in his car. As a young man, Helford, 46, from Chicago, sold parakeets with his father, who had a traveling exotic bird show, “Bob Helford’s Bird-O-Rama,” which went into department stores as part of a promotional tie-in for the pet supply company Hartz Mountain. Helford, too, came to L.A. and struggled. He tried acting and stand-up comedy. He worked in a pet shop and started a humor newspaper, called “L.A. Oops.”

Maybe in the writers’ room at “Frasier,” people pitch jokes that reference Jung and Sartre, but here in the “Drew” room, on a mid-July day a month before production starts, they’re passing around a magazine article about a guy who, on a $100,000 dare, got breast implants.

Call it literary inspiration. This year on “Drew,” drinking buddy Oswald (Diedrich Bader) is in for the same fate--agreeing to get implants as part of a scientific experiment that pays him $20,000, money he needs to save his mother’s failing business.

It’s a silly story line, the sort of thing the nudniks Lenny and Squiggy from “Laverne and Shirley” might do. Come to think of it, “Drew” and “Laverne and Shirley” share a comedic brain, blue-collar silly, with the soul intact. But “Drew” has also been able to find its own flavor, largely by regularly shifting into a kind of bizarro mode. There have been elaborately staged dance sequences featuring the entire cast, pop-up captions and fourth-wall-breaking contests for viewers plugged into the plot.

And then there’s Mimi, Drew’s workplace arch nemesis. As played by Kathy Kinney, Mimi is both sight gag and non sequitur--with the 100-watt outfits and the makeup that gives her the look of a mad Viking housewife, she instantly takes the show to another comedic realm.

As one of the show’s executive producers, Carey is a semi-regular in the writers’ room, which this year includes new additions Mike Larsen (“Grace Under Fire”), Richard Day (“The Larry Sanders Show”) and Dan O’Keefe and Jennifer Crittenden, who came over from “Seinfeld.”

Crittenden’s credits also include “The Simpsons,” which seems to lead to the following question: What’s she doing on “Drew”?

“After my meeting with Bruce, I just wanted to work wherever he was,” she says. “My mother of course wanted me to write for ‘Frasier.’ ”

You can hear the mother’s disappointment in Crittenden’s voice--as if she’d been accepted to Harvard but chose to attend Ringling Bros. Clown College instead. In one of the more outlandish episodes this season, Drew and Mimi get into a game of prank warfare, which ends when Drew wakes up at the Great Wall of China (Carey and executive producers Deborah Oppenheimer and Clay Graham are set to head there next month).

In other developments on the show, Drew and Mimi have sex; Drew’s boss, Mr. Wick, goes into drug rehab; Drew’s band, the Horn Dogs, gets a regular gig at a Ramada Inn (Carey’s taking accordion lessons, and the original members of Cleveland’s the James Gang, including Joe Walsh, will back him); and Drew starts dating a (much) older woman.

There’s also this potential plot twist on the horizon: Wednesday nights at 9 could turn into “The Drew Carey Hour.” This summer, ABC ordered six episodes of an improvisational sketch comedy show called “Whose Line Is It, Anyway?” hosted by Carey and featuring “Drew” co-star Ryan Stiles as a regular. The show did so well following reruns of Carey’s sitcom that ABC has ordered 13 more episodes. Might “Whose Line” end up at 9:30 on Wednesdays, following “Drew”? While ABC expects “The Secret Lives of Men” to secure the 9:30 slot after “Drew,” “Whose Line” is on deck, should any of ABC’s sitcoms falter.

“Whose Line” has been greeted with more favorable buzz from the critics than “Drew” received when the sitcom debuted three years ago. It’s something of a sore subject among the show’s staffers, this lack of praise for a sitcom that has established itself in prime time. Recently, when the Emmy nominations for best comedy came out and “Drew” was once again left off the list, Helford joked that the writers had already worked up a campaign slogan for next year: “Wouldn’t it be nice if they actually voted for best comedy?”

Indeed, the show’s anti-legacy already seems certain, the post-mortems already not written. Critics have tapped NBC’s “Frasier” or “Just Shoot Me,” Fox’s “Ally McBeal” and CBS’ “Everybody Loves Raymond” as the next comedy to be pop culture shorthand.

“Because we’re blue-collar, we’ll never get the accolades,” says Carey, betraying some working-class resentment of his own. “You have to tackle social issues or write about really urbane characters to get an Emmy or Golden Globe.”

“We’re not a sophisticated, witty show, but there are other types of people in the world,” Kinney says. “I’m from the Midwest, and it’s true that once you get outside New York and Los Angeles, people can relate to [Drew]. I had jobs like his. There are people who work like that every day.”

Co-star Stiles puts it slightly differently. Not only do the characters on “The Drew Carey Show” do less-than-glamorous work, their lifestyle reflects it--as opposed to sitcom characters “sitting in an apartment with half a million dollars’ worth of furniture [who] don’t seem to have jobs.”

To Helford, the issue is simple: You have to know blue-collar to write blue-collar. In a town crawling with twenty- and thirtysomething sitcom writers who’ve gone straight from college to the six-figure world of the writers’ room, is it any wonder so many so-called blue-collar shows lack soul?

“What writers who aren’t blue-collar believe to be blue-collar, and what blue-collar really is, are totally different, so a lot of those shows fail,” Helford says.

But unlike “Roseanne,” whose humor was tied to the simmering anger of its star, “The Drew Carey Show” isn’t masking anything that dark underneath.

“You know, we laugh at death, drink beer and go inside when it’s cold,” says Kinney, explaining the populist appeal of the show. “This is what life is all about.”