‘Drew Carey’ heading quietly for the exit

NEW YORK â€”  For all the attention given to this week’s “Friends” finale, another long-running comedy taped its final episode a few weeks ago -- and few people outside its Hollywood set were aware of it.

The finale of “The Drew Carey Show” is expected to air on ABC sometime this summer.

That the show still exists at all for its ninth season has more to do with a classically bad business deal than any sense viewers want to see it.

“You can point to a lot of things that ABC did -- they did a lot of things that were dumb,” said Sam Simon, who directed the final episode, “and I think this was one of them.”

Smart and stylish -- a blue-collar comedy set in Cleveland where the principals would occasionally break into a show tune -- Carey’s show once was one of ABC’s crown jewels. In the 1996-97 season, it averaged 17 million viewers, the first of three straight years in Nielsen Media Research’s top 20.

The show’s popularity was fading in 2001, but it still seemed savvy when ABC reached a deal with Warner Bros. Television, the show’s producers, to keep it on the air through 2004.

Then the bottom fell out.

It’s not clear whether viewers simply tired of the amiable, bespectacled comedian. Between his own show and “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” he logged a lot of face time on the network.

Or they may simply have tired of trying to find “The Drew Carey Show.” The program premiered on Wednesday nights, an evening where it has inhabited four separate time slots. It’s also been shown regularly on Tuesdays. And Thursdays. And Fridays. And Mondays.

By the middle of last season, ABC took it off the air, and burned off many of the show’s episodes during the summer.

ABC didn’t even bother putting it on this season. A new episode will premiere June 2, and the network will show two first-run episodes a week during the summer -- the television equivalent of an afterthought.

If all this annoys the star, he’s not letting on.

“I don’t have anything bad to say about ABC,” Carey said. “I never will. I only tried to do a good show. After that, it’s out of my hands.”

After the final taping, Carey gave cast and crew members a satellite radio and a photo collage as gifts.

The end had to be bittersweet, particularly compared with this week at NBC, where the “Friends” cast is exiting with a paroxysm of national mourning and $2 million-a-pop commercial spots.

“It was strange,” Simon said. “It was really strange.”