When did Drew Carey Show 'jump the shark'?

Like Cheers, it completely changed when the main character's love interest left the show.

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-The Joker

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To me when drew married Kate and Nikki at the same time, i think that was season 7 ish at the beginning. To bring Nikki back was kind of dumb, I downloaded season 2 -7 but once Nikki leaves in season 7 mad at drew I think at "It's Halloween Dummy" is where I was like this is kind of getting out of hand, and the whole drew always gets screwed over theme just gets redundant

I recently decided to watch all 9 seasons. I'd only seen a handful of episodes back in the 90's and I've really enjoyed watching them all...until season 9.

What the hell happened in season 9?? It's like the show was taken over by completely different writers. All of a sudden, Mimi is just one of the gang and isn't a complete psycho to everyone. And Drew turns into a jerk with his girlfriend, constantly doing terrible things and lying to her all for the sake of sitcom humor. I'm halfway through the season right now and most of the episodes are awful, but I want to stick it out until the end, just to see how the show wraps up.

I agree that the show lost a little of it's zest back in seasons 7 and 8, but it was still an awesome show. I didn't even care that Kate left or that Mimi stopped wearing giant globs of makeup or that they turned the department store into an internet business, because the show still remained fun and creative. But holy hell, season 9 is like an entirely different show. Did the core writers all quit? Did they take the unfinished scripts from some other lame sitcom that got canceled and just declare them Drew Carey Season 9?

EDIT FROM SEVERAL DAYS AFTER THIS POST: I finished the entire series! And while I still stand by my comments that Season 9 is the worst thing I've ever watched, the last 3 episodes of season 9 were awesome. Those last 3 went back to being what we all loved about the rest of the series. It was really great stuff. For those of you who couldn't make it all the way through season 9, skip ahead to those last few episodes.

Yeah, that was the beginning of the end.

late to the party, just finished watching the whole show.

Kate and Drew made no sense as a couple in my opinion, they had no romantic or sexual tension between them and it was the boring "will they, won't they" that most shows do.

it seems like i'm quite alone in this, but i actually liked season 8 and 9. they're very different but that's kinda what i like about it. they were brave enough to make some major changes and it worked for me. i liked Kellie much more than Kate (who i sometimes hated, sometimes thought was okay, rarely thought was funny) and kinda enjoyed Mimi being part of the gang. realism was never something the show relied on so i don't really care that some of it doesn't make sense.
what really did annoy me, though, was how Steve's character was handled. he started off totally different, suddenly stopped cross-dressing after stating how important it is to him, and ends up leaving his wife and kid to "find himself", something that totally came out of the blue (along with the affair he had prior to it).

what i noticed was that the opening themes always seemed to match the "crazy level" of the season. first season was quite tame and normal, just like the theme song. the cringe-worthy second opening theme kinda matched the second (and third?) season, where the show was starting to find itself. then came the cleveland rocks thing which fit perfectly, and when the show started to get REALLY out there and weird, they had the constantly changing and weird opening themes. just like the episodes ;)

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