The Nanny: The Complete First Season

The jokes are awful: "That's not the Queen Mother, that's my mother from Queens!" The clichés are dreadful: Rich people are fake and repressed, blue-collar types are fresh and honest, and kids are precociously mean little buggers. And that voice! Fran Drescher's Flushing-inflected diction could strip paint, and that seems to be the overarching goal of this most intolerable of sitcoms. Drescher's relentless screeching is the biggest, un-funniest running joke of these 22 episodes from the premiere 1993-1994 season of what--go figure--would become an Emmy-winning series. You'd think she'd drive people batty (as well as puncture eardrums), but her new boss, a snobby Broadway producer (Charles Shaughnessy), and his kids appear to like her, even though she's loud, obnoxious, and does all the things they should have expected a lowbrow sitcom nanny to do: lies to people about why she's suddenly living in a Park Avenue mansion, indulges in wildly inappropriate sexual innuendo, colludes with the children to defy their father, and so much more. Oh, but I forgot: her working-class wisdom is keepin' it real. DVD extras, if you can stand to listen, include commentaries by Drescher on three episodes, and a retrospective featurette. Optional. (M. Johanson)