Flying Blind

I remember this as the funniest sitcom ever (with the possible exception of Fawlty Towers). Hip, slick, witty and hilarious. Nebbishy Neal, a hapless wage-slave who lives with his parents, somehow wins the heart of hyper-It girl Alicia - the kind of girl who catapults around the world from one chic party to another, pursued madly by writers, artists, billionaires, Nobel-prize winning scientists (and four full-time stalkers who have got together to form a pop group which is very big in Sweden). His family are straight out of Neil Simon, her friends are from darkest Bohemia. Imagine a young Woody Allen dating one of the girls Carole Lombard or Katherine Hepburn used to play in those classic screwball comedies. Parker and Leoni are both adorable and hilarious and every one of the supporting characters and cast are great. The writing is genius.

The gods are jealous of perfection, so Flying Blind was cancelled prematurely, leaving those of us who'd come to love it in a state of grief and denial which has rendered bleak and futile our every waking hour since. If it's ever re-run do yourself a favour and check it out.

Tea Leoni's presentation of her character in Flying Blind has always stood out as one of the most perfect presentations of the ingenue femme fatale in all of television (and most of cinema). Wild, extravagent, guileless and innocent, this presentation is a guaranteed heart-breaker for anyone who believes The Perfect Woman actually exists. The show as a whole, while flawed, still glowed as result of this unexpectedly successful collision of writing and actress.

I must also concur with other comments that this show got the short-shrift reserved for other real comic gems like The Ben Stiller Show and (dare I say it in print) Duckman. While a different genre entirely, Flying Blind was buried late in the Sunday evening programming where it too was doomed to a quick death (probably because Married With Children was busy leaving its "mark" on television).

Comparisons to "Dharma and Greg" are fair, although this series was better (I like D&G too, but not anywhere near as much) and the only thing Dharma and Alicia have in common is free-spiritedness. The comparison to "Mad About You," however, is ridiculous. Calling "Mad About You" a classic is even more ridiculous. That aside, as a network suffers through its infancy, many good shows fall by the wayside. Baby nets have very few resources available to sustain good shows if they aren't getting good ratings. "Flying Blind" thus died a most undeserved early death. And as "The Naked Truth" has replaced it in most people's mind's "Tea Leoni file" the chance of anyone purchasing the reruns seems slight; a shame, because I'd like to see it again. "The Naked Truth" was a good show too, but not as good as this one.

This was such a funny series that, when it was canceled, I was stupefied. There are a lot of second-rate (or worse) shows being made all too often these days (especially the sitcom genre) but this wasn't one of them. It was brash, irreverent, high-spirited and had all the ingredients for a very successful series. I laughed my way through every episode. It never, ever disappointed. And when fresh faces were needed on "Ellen", at least Clea Lewis (Tea Leoni's wannabe hangaround friend in this series) was spotted and almost stole *that* show too!

I was broken-hearted when Flying Blind was canceled after one season. I thought it was one of the funniest series ever. But now I've been re-watching it on YouTube, and I have to admit I don't love it quite as much as before.

The series involves a nebbishy accounts executive who inexplicably lands a gorgeous, fantastically hip woman perpetually followed around by a string of brilliant ex-lovers.

Like Neil, I was a nebbishy New Yorker in the early '90s, so the show represented my dream life of sex and art. How could I not love it?

The humor was very much Catskills comedy, and one of the fascinating features is the difference in delivery styles between Corey Parker and Tea Leoni. They both tell a lot of jokes structured like, "that's the biggest blank since my relative did blank at the blank," but whereas Parker does a Woody Allen impression (a good one), Leoni has this odd, shambling way of telling the same jokes. She is one of those rare comedic actors who sound like they're actually creating the joke as they go along, and while much of the series performance arts jokes seem less edgy than they did in the 90s, her delivery is still pretty unusual.

While I don't love the series as I once did, I still find it quite likable, and there are many excellent performers, including Micheal Tucci as Neil's father (their familial similarity comes mainly in how they tell jokes) and especially Clea Lewis as Alicia's overshadowed roommate.

While this is a far more conventional sitcom than I realized at the time, it actually does have a pretty good sense of the period. Alicia is an exaggeration of a real type, and at times she manages to capture that emotional instability that makes women like her far less appealing to older, wiser men like the me of today, who knows enough to run away.

Some fans may think my 7 star review is too low. If it's any comfort, my 23-year-old self would completely agree with you.