The Nanny: The Complete Series

On his blog several years back, Ken Levine, who wrote for M*A*S*H, Cheers, and Frasier, offered a colleague's 10 ways to tell a bad sitcom. No. 10: “Any show with Fran Drescher is a bad sitcom.” Starring Fran Drescher, The Nanny, which somehow lasted six seasons, belongs to a subgenre of sitcoms where the hired help becomes one of the family, and it features broadly-played stereotypes, insipid writing, and a grating leading lady with a Lucille Ball complex. Drescher stars as Fran, a freshly dumped cosmetics salesperson from Queens, who is unaccountably hired as a nanny for the children of a British theatre producer (Charles Shaughnessy). It's an old fish-out-of-water concept that becomes even fishier when the reserved WASP household is intruded on by Fran's overbearing Jewish mother (Renee Taylor) and senile grandmother (Ann Morgan Guilbert). Stock characters include the snooty butler who likes Fran, and the producer's female business partner who does not. The Nanny was ceaselessly inventive in the ways it found to “jump the shark,” with fantasy episodes, musical production numbers, classic TV homages, dream episodes, and even one in which Fran meets Fran Drescher. And the list of guest stars through the years is impressive (Elizabeth Taylor, David Letterman, and Bette Midler among them; monologist Spaulding Gray even had a character arc as Fran's therapist). But The Nanny is very much if its time—the ‘90s—and that time has passed (topical humor as a rule does not generally have a long shelf life). Compiling all 146 episodes from 1993-99, extras include episode commentaries, a “making of” featurette, and a new behind-the-scenes featurette with Drescher and production partner (and ex-husband) Peter Marc Jacobson. Not a necessary purchase. (D. Liebenson)