The Jeff Foxworthy Show

I happen to like that redneck comedian Jeff Foxworthy, yet I can't tell which TV show is better, "The Jeff Foxworthy Show" or "Blue Collar TV." Both are good comedies, however, "The Jeff Foxworthy Show" is more of a family-oriented comedy while "Blue Collar TV" seems to be a redneck version of "Saturday Night Live." I just purchased a copy of "The Jeff Foxworthy Show: The Complete First Season" on DVD, which is pretty funny, but I think Sony Pictures Television (formerly Columbia-Tristar Television) should release the complete second season on DVD because I would like to purchase a copy. Besides having the show on DVD, the only other way to watch this show is via Saturday nights on Nick @ Nite (I like to call this Nick @ Nite's Saturday Night "Redneck Hour"). Very good show, and should have had a longer run. Bill Engvall (second season "The Jeff Foxworthy Show"), is very good as well.

I have the first season on DVD and started watching it again last night. I thought this was a very good clean show that the family could watch instead of the garbage we see today. It wasn't dealing with the dysfunctional family like we saw on Roseanne, The Simpsons and Married with Children. It's just too bad the networks didn't give it a chance to build an audience and bring in the people needed to tweak it. But then again, these same networks got all panicky and wanted to can shows like All in the Family, M*A*S*H, and Seinfeld because they weren't doing so good in their first few seasons. Big mistake on the networks part and the reason you see so many people watching more shows on networks like The Discovery Channel than are watching the major networks.

I never even knew this show existed until last week. I tried one episode and loved it so I immediately watched the whole first season. Jay Mohr and Debra Jo Rupp were both hilarious. Then came the second season. Those two were replaced by the comedic genius of Bill Engvall, ugh. That man has never said a funny thing in his life. Anyway, they don't even explain what happened to Jeff's brother, their business or his wife's sister. For the entire first season Jeff's wife was pregnant and many times they said it was a girl. Turns out it was a 4 year old boy. Seven stars if there hadn't been a second season.

I guess when they started filming the first season, the network executives at ABC didn't know that Jeff Foxworthy had already sold more comedy albums than Carlin, Cosby, or Pryor. Instead of going with Foxworthy's proved style of comedy, they decided to juxtapose a Southern, rural, redneck Jeff against his Midwestern-intellectual-snobbish in-laws, his neighbor Craig, and his wife Karen. Perhaps the suits thought the in-laws and others would act a foil against which Jeff's Southern persona could be displayed. It never really worked. Jeff's existing fan base, myself included, did not recognize Jeff Foxworthy in his own show; "Who's this guy?" - it was nothing like his comedy - totally alien. In an interview years later Foxworthy explained that for the first six months of filming he wasn't even allowed in the writer's room.

ABC tried to retool the show by dumping the characters Russ and Walt, who worked at Jeff's HVAC business and bringing in Jay Mohr as Jeff's wild brother, Wayne. Still didn't work. Eventually the ABC suits cancelled the show.

But it was resurrected and retooled by NBC. Jeff's business tanks and he returns to his hometown, the fictional Briarton, Georgia, but his wife is played by a different actress, Ann Cusack. I don't know why Anita Barone left, maybe NBC thought she was too saucy to be believable as Jeff's wife, so they brought in whiney Cusack. They also have another son, Justin, played by Jonathon Lipnicki.

The move to the South provided Jeff's character with a history from which Foxworthy's comedy could flow. The setting and characters allow more of the familiar Foxworthy comedy to come out – professional wrestling, big hair, trailer parks, mud boggin', cousins marrying and so forth. Jeff's high school best friend, Bill Pelton, played by real life friend and comedian Bill Engvall, Jeff's dad Big Jim Foxworthy played by G.W. Bailey are central characters that add so much more to the show than the ABC version's peripheral characters ever did.

But even NBC couldn't leave the show alone. The biggest changes were at Jeff's place of employment, Pitt's Trucking. Bosses came and went, so did truck drivers and dock workers. The second season had strong episodes and weak ones, but overall was a vast improvement. Unfortunately the network suits didn't want to invest another season in hopes of improved rating, and the show was eventually cancelled, this time for good.

If any comic in the last ten years stood out as the potential source of a possible hit sitcom -- like Bill Cosby, Roseanne, Andy Griffith, and others before him -- it would be Jeff Foxworthy. He's a likable presence and his humor appeals to a wide range of Americans. Yet instead of taking a cue from these past successes and building around him a world inspired by his humor, the producers instead transplanted him to suburban Illinois. It was a fish-out-of-water comedy set in a Northern college town (without actually embracing his distinctly rural Southern humor), and complicated his life with snobby, intellectual in-laws who always misjudged him. It was well done, for what it was, but it wasn't what his fans were expecting and it didn't stand out for the rest of the audience. It got lost, the ratings tanked, ABC cancelled it.

But someone wisely saw Foxworthy's potential, and brought the production to NBC...with changes. New producers who were more in tune with Foxworthy's strengths built a new world for him. Gone were the snobby in-laws and curvy, sexy Anita Barone as his wife, Karen, to be replaced with willowy, neurotic Ann Cusack (younger sister to John and Joan). Foxworthy was uprooted from the North and planted back in the South, in his small fictitious Georgia hometown. No longer would the show be taped in a studio with a laugh track, it would be filmed before a live audience. And no longer was pre-"Sixth Sense" Haley Joel Osment an only child; he now had to contend with sibling rivalry from Jonathan Lipnicki, fresh off the set of "Jerry Maguire". Add the always fun G.W. Bailey as Foxworthy's womanizing get-rich-quick-scheming father and Bill Engvall as his best friend, and you've got the kind of riotous yet heartwarming comedy that harks back to "The Andy Griffith Show".

Unfortunately, retooling any show to this extent seems to doom it. Cusack played off Foxworthy better (with Barone, he always seemed a little henpecked, although that was due to the writing, not the actress), but the addition of Lipnicki felt like stunt casting. The fictional Foxworthy's friends were essentially the same doomed losers as in the first version, but they fit better, had more heart and were a lot funnier. Viewers who had stuck with it on ABC felt lost -- even though the past "incarnation" of the show was referenced early on, there were too many structural changes in the Foxworthy family to accept a continuity between the two versions of the show. Foxworthy's stand-up fans had largely tuned out during the previous version and weren't likely to give it another chance.

If the second version of the show had been the first, this show might still be on the air, and Foxworthy would be retiring it soon after ten successful years. Unfortunately, it wasn't.