Creator: Drew Carey, Bruce Helford
Years: 1995-2004
Drew Carey is not a terribly funny human being. He’s eager. He writes some good material. But in comedy, delivery is everything, and Carey’s delivery is horrendous.
That said, I didn’t hate this show. It took a lot of risks while most comedies in the 90’s were doing conventional. They even had live shows that involved a lot of improvisation. Certainly a natural thing for Ryan Stiles, but not so much for most of the actors. But there’s about one really good laugh per episode and just a lot of jokes that fall flat. There’s a reason the show has a laugh track. Otherwise I don’t think anyone would think the character of Mimi is anything but stupid. Even Craig Ferguson is pretty flat.
Christa Miller has historically been in my Top 5. That certainly helps.
Death By Troggles 
But they were homebrewers, which didn’t count for anything from me at the time.
Got give the show props for its opening title sequences though. Quite the contrast to the five-second-no-personality-lets-save-more-room-for-commercials intros used now. Cleveland Rocks was quite the production, and always fun to sing along with.
Yeah, that was a dang good intro.
Everything I would have mentioned has been mentioned, almost – the opening and the improv episodes were good, and Drew really can’t act.
I’ll also log my general appreciation for Diedrich Bader here, although neither he nor Stiles ever got any beefy material in the show, from what I remember. I also appreciated the show’s willingness to go off in a wildly different direction when things had gotten stale.