The Best of The Steve Harvey Show, Vol. 1 (1996-2002)
Film:
DVD:

Directed by Stan Lathan
Starring Steve Harvey, Cedric the Entertainer, Wendy Raquel Robinson, Merlin Santana, William Lee Scott

Features:

• Five episodes
  

Released by Columbia/Tristar
Rating: NR
Region: 1
Anamorphic: N/A; episodes appear in their original 1.33:1 format.

My Advice: Rent it.

Meet Steve Hightower (Harvey). You might recognize Hightower from when he was on the top of the R&B heap as headliner of the group The Hi-Tops. That was awhile back, though, and now he barely has a few dimes to rub together. He decides to settle down and acquire some gainful employment. Through his buddy and high school coach Cedric (Entertainer), he lands a job as music teacher at Washington High School. Not only does he have to deal with kids all day long, but there's the matter of the principal there, Regina (Robinson), who was once a tad chunky and the butt of many of Hightower's jokes. Now, though, she's...well, to put it frankly, BAM--but never fails to give him grief.

This show was previously unknown to me, for I don't watch a great deal of television. It must have done something right, though, for it ran six seasons before winding down just last year. It's easy to see how this could have appealed, with two comedians heading up the front line and a decent supporting cast behind them. The good news is that when the show is funny, it's startlingly funny. When it's not, which is, sadly, about seventy-five percent of the time, the jokes just fall flat. It's when it's reaching for nice references--such as Harvey reacting to his class' butchering of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" by mentioning that Mahalia Jackson was going to come back from the dead to deliver beatdowns upon them all--it's fall out of your chair stuff. But unfortunately, that's not always the case.

A perfect example of this is stellar comedic actress Isabel Sanford, who plays Steve's mom on the first episode on this disc. The running gag is that Cedric killed her dog, which is funny the first time it's mentioned, but it's driven down through the Earth's mantle. When you have a guest star of that renown and talent, and you don't have better material to give her, it's kinda sad.

There are no features to speak of on the disc, which is to be expected for a sampler title like this. No doubt, sooner or later, the series will start to hit DVD like every other television program--and then you'll at least get a wider range of episodes and hopefully some features to boot. This disc purports to have the five highest rated episodes from the show--so if you've got a favorite on here, it might be worth renting. But only the diehards should buy, because you know the boxed set is somewhere out there.