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The best new ensemble comedy of the season is at least something of a departure. ABC's The Drew Carey Show (Wednesdays, 8:30 p.m. E.T.), starring and co-created by stand-up comic Carey, is a working-class Friends--a hip sitcom in which the characters avoid coffee bars, congregating instead in beer joints and bare kitchens with no visible signs of a Williams-Sonoma shopping spree.
Unlike most of his sitcom contemporaries, Drew (as Carey's character is called on the show) is no wiry Manhattanite spewing caustic one-liners. He's a beefy Midwesterner who is sparing with his barbs. As a department-store personnel manager, he finds his travails are more mundane. In the pilot Drew is threatened with a lawsuit by an obese woman in mounds of blue eye shadow who cries sexual discrimination when he doesn't hire her to run the cosmetics counter. Carey is so buffoonish he can elicit laughs with a mere bobbing tilt of his head. Among his friends, Ryan Stiles is engaging as a janitor reminiscent of Christopher Lloyd's Reverend Jim on Taxi.
If only the higher-tax-bracket singles on the new CBS drama Central Park West (Wednesdays, 9 p.m. E.T.) were as amusing. The show, revolving around a wealthy New York publishing family, was developed by Darren Star, creator of Melrose Place. But it lacks that series' appealing campiness. On Melrose the characters are so unfailingly stupid that they remain dumbfounded every single time they are blackmailed or cheated on. In comparison, the CPW crowd is rather sharp and as a result less fun to watch. Still, there are snippets of irresistible dialogue. When a stockbroker dumps his girlfriend after squandering her fortune in bad investments, she screams, "Why wasn't I diversified? What kind of scum are you?"
The characters on this season's more intriguing dramas have weightier things to worry about than the fluctuating value of hedge funds. Inspired by the success of the Fox series The X-Files, several new one-hour dramas venture into the paranormal. Strange Luck, which will air on Fox just before The X -Files (Fridays, 8 p.m. E.T.), centers on a photojournalist (D.B. Sweeney) who as a child survived a plane crash. Now he keeps finding himself in life-threatening predicaments, from which he somehow always succeeds in escaping.
A psychically beleaguered photographer is also at the center of Nowhere Man, an unusually frightening and well-acted thriller on the UPN network (Mondays, 9 p.m. E.T.). Thomas Veil (Bruce Greenwood) returns to his table at a restaurant to discover that his wife has vanished and everyone in his life suddenly doesn't know him. His identity has been erased, and the show tracks his efforts to regain it.