Drew Carey on the Show’s Pilot, Being a ‘Bad Auditioner,’ and Thinking ‘Any Day, I Could Be Fired’ (Exclusive)
Drew Carey has been a near-constant presence on our TV screens for 30 years, first with nine seasons of The Drew Carey Show, and then with The Price is Right, which Carey has hosted since 2007. But to hear the actor and comedian tell it, he still approaches every job with the belief that “nothing’s guaranteed.” While working on The Drew Carey Show from 1995 to 2004 with co-creator Bruce Helford, Carey recalls, “We weren’t pie in the sky about what the TV business was. We knew we had to work and be funny and come up with the goods every week, or we were going to get canceled.”
With the long-awaited complete DVD box set of The Drew Carey Show finally released (previously, only the show’s first season was available), Carey and Helford spoke to ReMIND about the show’s early days, how Carey and another one of the show’s stars were “really bad at auditioning,” and feeling that “any day I could be fired. I could be let go.”
On what they were thinking when they shot the pilot
Drew Carey: We thought … “wouldn’t it be great if the pilot got picked up?” And then, “wouldn’t it be great if we got to film the pilot?” And then, “wouldn’t it be great if they picked up half a season? Oh, wouldn’t that be great if we got renewed for a second season?” … We never counted our chickens before they hatched.
© ABC / Courtesy Everett Collection
And we both weren’t pie in the sky about what the TV business was. We knew we had to work and be funny and come up with the goods every week, or we were going to get canceled.
I’ve always felt like that, doing standup and doing The Price is Right: you’ve got to show up at the club. You’ve got to do a good show that night, and be present that night. And that’s carried on through my whole career where I’m just like, any day I could be fired. I could be let go.
I remember when we got picked up for the pilot order. We turned in the script, and we had to [wait until] a certain Friday at six o’clock [to find out], and six o’clock came and went and we didn’t get the call.
And I remember, I was like, “ah, fuck.” They didn’t pick up the pilot and it’s The Drew Carey Show. So that’s the end of me selling a show with me as the star, you really only get one chance to star at a sitcom, if you’re lucky. And then we got a call at quarter after six, like, “Hey, they’re picking it up and you can make a pilot.” And I was like, “holy shit. That was close.” It was never a sure thing.
On why the show was so unique
Bruce Helford: My father was a real PT Barnum, he was in the pet business, and he always told me, “you’ve got to come up with something special. You’ve got to be unique. You’ve got to be different.” And for me it was like, what can we do next? Drew and I always talk about how to innovate, how can we do something special?
Jerry Wolfe /© ABC / Courtesy Everett Collection
And when we hit the dance number, that was really the beginning of it. Because when ABC saw that, it was like nothing they’d ever seen. And they were like, wow. From then on, there was a trust level, I think. And it changed the audience mode. We went from being a struggling show to, it’s just upward, upward, upward.
DC: A lot of things happen [on the show] where you’re like, “wow, that was out of nowhere, but it was really funny.” And so you never really knew what to expect. And we never felt constrained in any way. There was always an out for us to have fun and get a laugh.
I remember [in an episode], I was super starving and it was Thanksgiving Day or something, and I was imagining a turkey in my head, and the turkey came to life and was animated and danced around to, I think we did the Lenny Kravitz version of “Cold Turkey,” just to show my dream in my head.
And I was like, “nobody does that.” They’ll make a joke about it, or four lines and make a joke about how hungry the character was, and then they’ll go on to the next one. But nobody goes to that trouble, this cartoonish level of trying to get a laugh with anything. And we were just game to just go for it. If it made us laugh really hard in the room, we would try to get it done.
On casting the show
DC: It’s such a wild process to pick somebody. And then, when you pick somebody, you’re like, “I think they’re going to work out.” And then when you see the first episode, you’re like, “Ooh, I knew it was going to be like this. I knew it was going to be this good.”
BH: A person who was great but a terrible auditioner was Kate Walsh [who played Nicki]. Kate Walsh was an awful auditioner, and the casting director said, she’s wonderful. Don’t look at her audition. Don’t even bother. Just hire her. And we did. And she was not just a great actress, but really funny.
Challenge Roddie / TV Guide / ©NBC / Courtesy Everett Collection
DC: I’m a terrible auditioner. I’m really bad at auditioning. To the point where people were like, how’d you get on TV? And I was like, I such a bad auditioner had to write my own show. Honestly, if I would’ve depended on just me auditioning to get on shows, I’d still be doing standup in a club.
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