This show is hilarious.
I never understood the scorn the critics heaped on this show over its time on the air.
It's about as realistic a comic portrayal of our nation's largest city as will ever be seen on broadcast TV. It's certainly more realistic than "Friends", which show a New York almost completely devoid of minorities, or "Will and Grace", an allegedly "gay" show in which the gay characters have almost no sex lives. (Could we at least hear some moaning from behind a locked door once in a while?)
But back to "Becker". It's as though someone at CBS said, "What if Harvey Pekar, the grumpy file clerk from 'American Splendor', had a medical degree from Harvard?" Fiction, you say? You must belong to the Shangri-La HMO.
A divorced, single50-something man in a job he really doesn't like, in a city he'd rather not live in, working with people he's not that crazy about, eating every meal in a diner that looks like a roach motel, going home every night to a peeling, cramped apartment that looks like it reeks of cigarette smoke, in full self-pity mode, wondering what that whoop-di-doo college education was worth if all it got him was THIS!? You see that type every day, and that includes doctors.
The only thing that could make it funnier would be if Wanda Sykes were the owner of the diner (and his love interest). Or maybe Whoopi Goldberg. Ted Danson and Whoopi Goldberg as a romantic couple!? Nah ;)
