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Bless This House aired from September 1995 until January 1996 on CBS.
Foul-mouthed stand up comic Andrew Dice Clay shortened his name and attempted to change his image in this short lived sitcom that could be described as The Honeymooners with kids. Burt and Alice ( Andrew Clay, Cathy Moriarty), were a working-class couple living in an aging apartment complex in Trenton, New Jersey, with their 12 year old daughter Danny ( Raegan Kotz), and young son Sean ( Sam Gifaldi). Blustery Burt was a post office supervisor, and sharp-tongued Alice worked in the parts department of a local car dealership. Sure they fought-often-but they loved each other and their kids. Living on the floor below were new parents Phyllis( Molly Price), Alice's best friend, and klutzy, well-meaning Lenny ( Don Stark), who worked with Burt at the post office. Others seen regularly were Cuba ( Wren T. Brown), another postal worker, Vicki ( Patricia Healy), the sexy divorced mother on the make who lived in the building, and Jane ( Kimberly Cullum), Danny's best friend.Throughout most of the series short run the Claytons were trying to buy a house and move out of their apartment, but when they finally succeeded, the costs were such that they had to rent the house to one of Burt's co-workers ( who moved in with 22 of his relatives) and ended up back in the apartment.
A Review Of Bless This House And The Drew Carey Show From Entertainment Weekly
The Drew Carey Show, Bless This House
Reviewed by Ken Tucker
I suppose we can hold Roseanne responsible for both BLESS THIS HOUSE (CBS, Wednesdays, 8-8:30 p.m.) and THE DREW CAREY SHOW (ABC, Wednesdays, 8:30-9 p.m.). After all, if she hadn't single-handedly revived the notion of the lower-middle-class situation comedy -- a sitcom subgenre that had languished since Archie Bunker bellowed his final epithet -- chances are the networks wouldn't be taking chances on the cheerfully crass protagonists of these two new shows.
In Bless This House, Andrew Clay stars as a voluble postal worker in a show so anxious to be compared to The Honeymooners, it had Clay yelling, ''Hey, Alice, I'm home!'' in the pilot episode. The Drew Carey Show features the bullet-shaped stand-up as a harried department-store assistant personnel director whose highest words of praise for a woman are, ''She's crude, she's vulgar, and she hates all the same people I do.''
Both of these shows take for granted the beliefs that Roseanne brought to the genre -- namely, that members of the lower middle class may be ill-educated, but are not stupid; that they feel ill-respected by those above them and aren't going to take it anymore.
It is, though, pretty creepy to see Andrew Clay attaching himself to themes like this. Just a few years ago, Clay was ''the Diceman,'' venting more obscene spleen than any stand-up comedian before him, rousing rabble and becoming less and less funny by the second. But the bottom fell out of his shock act, and now he's acting the lovey-dovey husband with costar Cathy Moriarty. Moriarty brings timing, depth, and sympathy to Bless This House, which is lucky for Clay, since he's primarily around to look like a big, befuddled teddy bear and to deliver his lines in his usual Brooklyn slur. (Holding up a small pair of trousers, he bleats, ''Ya shrunk my paints!'')
Bless has smart things to say about how hardworking parents manage family life, but the show is hobbled by its endless succession of squalid sex jokes. When the 12-year-old daughter in the family (Raegan Kotz) asks Moriarty, ''How long did it take you to become a mother?'' Moriarty replies, ''Two minutes and a bottle of Chianti.'' Call me a square, but this is pretty yucky stuff for a mother-daughter exchange. Bless This House is best when Clay and Moriarty argue and then make up; that's when their wrangling romance rings most true.
Drew Carey has been a far more interesting stand-up comic than Andrew Clay, so it's not surprising that The Drew Carey Show, while taking up the themes of Roseanne, is smart enough to place its own spin on these notions. Carey's character -- called Drew Carey -- is an affable cynic, a Cleveland shlub who's bought his parents' old house and keeps a pool table in the backyard. Drew doesn't want much out of life, just a fridge full of beer and the company of his pals-played by the likable but so far interchangeable Diedrich Bader and Ryan Stiles, along with the utterly charming Christa Miller, whose Kate is already one of the more vivid women on television, neither bombshell nor Rhoda-esque wiseacre -- a regular person, for a change!
Carey himself is a fidgety guy. He doesn't just deliver a line -- he kind of dances around it, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. At first I found this, combined with his habit of looking down and grinning fixedly when he speaks to someone, pretty annoying. But his lines are so amusing and his timing so sharp that I've come to like Carey's anti-acting style. Unlike most airless sitcoms, The Drew Carey Show has a real sense of place and atmosphere; Drew's house looks lived in, and when he's sprawled on a couch reading a comic book (Harvey Pekar's marvelous Cleveland-based comic American Splendor), he looks utterly at ease. I'd rather bless Carey's house than Clay's. Bless This House: C The Drew Carey Show: B+
A Review from The Virginian Pilot
ROLLING THE DICE ANDREW CLAY HAS DROPPED HIS MIDDLE NAME AND HIS RAUNCHY IMAGE FOR SITCOM.
THE BIG GUY in the blue bowling shirt who co-stars in ``Bless This House,'' a sitcom that begins its run on CBS tonight at 8 after a sneak preview two nights ago, is The Diceman himself.
Andrew Clay.
With the exception of maybe Mark Fuhrman, Clay is the last man you would expect to see cast as a lovable lug and a devoted family man in an 8 p.m. network sitcom.
Working as a chain-smoking, foul-mouthed, female-bashing, sex-obsessed stand-up comic who dressed in black leather studded with rhinestones, he was so wild and raunchy that MTV banned him for life. Howard Stern is Alistair Cooke compared to the Clay of the 1980s.
``Nightline,'' which usually concerns itself with international crises such as the mess in Bosnia, took up the subject of Clay's vulgarity about six years ago because he had outraged so many women. Ted Koppell looked disgusted.
``The Diceman thing sort of got out of hand. Newspapers such as the The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times were saying my act would be the demise of Western civilization,'' Clay said when meeting recently with members of the Television Critics Association in Los Angeles.
When audiences lost interest in The Diceman, the comic, Clay turned to films, appearing in ``The Adventures of Ford Fairlane'' and ``Amazon Women on the Moon,'' to name a few. As they flopped, so did Clay's concert career.
He was hot, and then he was not.
``Three years ago, I couldn't get a dog-food commercial,'' he said.
Look at him now.
Andrew ``Dice'' Clay is the respectable Andrew Clay, husband and father of two co-starring on network TV with the marvelous Cathy Moriarity in a show that is, without apologies, an update of Jackie Gleason's ``The Honeymooners.'' Gleason starred in that hit from 1956 to 1971.
Clay suggested that his portrayal of postal worker and ardent bowler Burt Clayton is ``a mix of both Gleason and Roseanne.''
The Diceman, who appealed to audiences ``who just wanted cursing and vulgarity,'' was not the real Andrew Clay, he said.
If he offended women in the past, he apologizes for it today.
``I always had respect for women,'' he said. ``There were things written and said about me that were blown way out of proportion. I never had a woman come up to me and say, `I hate you.' (Nora Dunn of ``Saturday Night Live'' came close when she refused to appear on camera with Clay).
``When I do The Diceman on stage, it is an act. A character. In the sitcom, the part of Burt is closer to who I am. He's human.''
His co-star, Moriarity, shrugs off Clay's past as the comic from hell, referring to him as ``my huggy bear.''
This Academy Award nominee - a lovely presence with her long blond hair and all - has comic timing as sharp as Audrey Meadows ever had playing opposite Gleason's Ralph Kramden.
And her Bronx accent! His Brooklyn accent!
Burt and wife Alice - didn't I say ``Bless This House'' was a testimonial to ``The Honeymooners'' gang? - live in a too-small Trenton, N.J., apartment. They'd like a house in the suburbs.
But how can they afford it?
``We have only enough and nothing extra,'' said Burt, speaking for blue-collar families everywhere. Alice works as a cashier.
So they go on paying rent as they have done for 13 years.
The Diceman cast as a caring husband and father. Do wonders ever cease?
``This cleanliness thing of doing a situation comedy feels good,'' Clay said. ``Burt's a real guy, a guy from the middle class who wants better for his family. I call him the underdog.''
Clay has not retired as a stand-up comic. Only his act has changed. ``Today, I make myself the butt of the jokes,'' he said. ``I now have a reality-based act, like when I talk about quitting smoking. I quit smoking a year ago but I still buy cigarettes just to hold them. How dumb is that?''
Although ``Bless This House'' is light years away from Clay's stand-up, it is stretching things to call it clean entertainment. There is a trend at the family hour on network TV to introduce one-liners about sex and body functions.
In ``Bless This House,'' the dialogue makes reference to butts, boobs and venereal disease. The kids hear about adults ``doing it'' on the coffee table.
Perhaps The Diceman isn't so far from his element after all. To the criticism that ``Bless This House,'' and several other shows airing from 8 to 9 p.m., push the limits of taste, producer Bruce Helford told TV writers, ``The kids of today, as opposed to kids in the families of the 1950s, know so much more. You really can't hide much from them.''
I guess that justifies the scene in ``Bless This House'' when mom (Moriarity) chastises daughter Danny (12-year-old Raegan Kotz) for monopolizing the bathroom: ``You shouldn't stand around all day admiring your little hooters. . . .''
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