Dave’s World

1990s tv sitcom

Dave Barry works as a columnist for Florida magazine. Well, works might be a bit stretch, he sits around the house and tries to do as little as possible.

Dave Barry works as a columnist for a Florida-based magazine, at least officially. Unofficially he sits around the house and tries to come up with idea for his next column and usually fails to. This brings misery to his boss and friend, Kenny Beckett, but also annoys Dave’s wife, Beth. Usually the unimportant events from family life, which involves Beth and their two sons, gives him an idea for original look on life. After long day of watching TV and wandering around the house in dressing gown Dave relaxes together with Beth, Kenny and their rich doctor friend Sheldon while playing some poker.

Sitcom based around columns of real-life Dave Barry, who won Pulitzer Price for his humour columns for Miami Herald, which in a way set the environment for the whole show - it is mixture of anecdotes taken from his life, looks on life, dating, parenting, friendship and some, on surface, trivial matters that define who we are and what our lives are all about. On one hand the creators took a lot of the original ideas from the columns, they used them as intro and outro for each episode, but at the same time it left the show a bit confined to just one house and Dave’s not that exciting life.

While a lot of early episodes were refreshingly original Dave’s World often was balancing between sitcom setting and serious undertones about family, children, parenting, etc. With time the creators tried to shake things a bit by introduction of Eric character and changing character of Mia to regular cast member, which moved the show toward more typical sitcom style, but at the same time the clash between silly and serious elements was only increased. It was blindingly obvious from Season 3, where there were episodes that made very little sense or had very little to do with rest of the series.

For example Don’t Blame Me, in which Dave (one of the most mellow characters on sitcoms) wants to have sun deck built over weekend, but not by professionals, because he wants it now. Or Double Fault, in which Shel tries to use Dave in celebrity tennis match for charity, even though Dave does not play tennis and then drags Beth into pretending that the ringer is in fact her husband. Both episodes were completely inconsistent with rest of the show, the scenes were full of out-of-character behaviours from main protagonists and, to be fair, were really poorly written - all of the signs of sitcom that is about to die. And the final episode of the same season, "It’s Not About That, Either", in which main character delves into meaning of religion... well, it was just a bit weird mixture at that point.

Dave’s World certainly was original idea with interesting main characters, some not bad scripts, but the constant balancing between typical sitcom formula and family show wasn’t doing it much favours - some episodes were too out there, some of them were too down-to-earth. Overall not bad show, but at the same time not remarkable.

Rating	6.0
Funny	6 / 10
Entertaining	3 / 5
Characters	4 / 5
Nonrepetitive	2 / 5