Sam

One of the less successful moments in the late George Carlin’s great career was in 1994 when he did a self-titled sitcom for the Fox network. It was a well-meaning project. Fox, which had been in business less than ten years, still had a reputation for being an edgy network; it was the only broadcast network that would have allowed Carlin to be even a watered-down version of himself. Any other network would have stuck him with a wife and three cute kids; on Fox he was a weird conspiracy-theorizing New York cabbie, which is a character he could plausibly play. The creator was Sam Simon, one of the co-creators of The Simpsons; it was his first project after quitting The Simpsons. And the show was slotted after Married… With Children, a very solid hit and not a bad lead-in for Carlin’s iconoclasm.