Dharma & Greg

Speaking of DVD releases, season 3 of The Nanny came out recently, and while I didn’t buy it, I’m glad it’s not completely dead. I’ve always thought that show was underrated — but then it would have to be considering how widely hated it appears to be within the TV business. (Veteran director Alan Rafkin chose it as the worst show he ever directed on; Ken Levine made a joke about “the horror of being forced to watch the Nanny retrospective.”) And of course anyone who actually had to work with Fran Drescher gets my deepest sympathies. But the show was one of the few ’90s sitcoms in the old broad comedy tradition, with Borscht-belt jokes and stereotypes of both Jews and WASPs, and it was kind of refreshing in an era when comedy was already showing a disturbing tendency toward blandness. I think it holds up better than Friends and several other shows of the era.