mat9813004 I started watching this show as a progression from "Unhappily ever after" which has a number of hilarious scenes. The one with the rabbit voiced by Bobcat Goldthwait and Geof Piersens "Jack Malloy" trying to leave a message on the answer machine character was hilarious. In that show Nikki Cox plays Tiffany Malloy which became a breakout character later in the show and you could argue that the "Nikki" character is a more humanized version of that character without the assumed success of the Tiffany character. Not really sure I would want to watch a TV show based around the Tiffany characters projected life path really.The show is based around Nikki and Dwights relationship, where Nikki is a Las Vegas showgirl and Dwight is wrestler. The early episodes open with dance numbers, often in jokingly bad taste but are interesting. The Dwight character is actually quite likable, not the mindless thug one would expect and much of the humour of the show works by challenging the assumptions people would have about the characters. He delivers the line "You know that feeling when someone is screwing around with you but deep down you know they like you. Well, I'm not getting that feeling" about meeting Nikki's father in season one episode 16 "I'll kick your Ass".I found the support characters interesting Toby Huss's character "Jupiter" has many of the mannerisms of Groucho Marx, obviously without the cigar but in the tradition of a business man/ showman with a sometimes shoddy product. Susan Egans character is a comedic femme fatal character who is cheerfully amoral but we are lead to believe has heart of gold, because although much of the show has a darker gallows humour they are likable characters. Much comedy is about laughing at the darkness.

liquidcelluloid-1 Network: WB; Genre: Sitcom; Content Rating: TV-PG (for adult content); Classification: Contemporary (star range: 1 - 4); Season Reviewed: Complete Series (2 seasons) I don't know why anybody would do this, but if you trace the career path of Nikki Cox you will find yourself tripping over "Nikki" on the way from a brief role in the cult favorite "The Norm Show" to the mainstream hit "Las Vegas". In it you will find the WB spending away like a drunken sailor whatever capital Cox accrued after her breakout role in their "Unhappily Ever After". My uncommon likeness of "Unhappily" is on record. Yes, it was a "Married…with Children" rip-off, but I think it is one of the best bad shows on the air and one of the gutsiest shows the WB has seen. With Cox's popularity on the rise it only made sense to try to give this supporting character actress her chance at a lead role.But the reason Cox has been successful, and remains successful, is because she or her agents know her limitations and have the foresight to take an actress known more for her assets not related to acting than her comic ability (which isn't nonexistent) and give her a supporting role or surround her with real pros. "Nikki" is the first, and hopefully, last time where they slipped up and bit off more than they can chew. Cox's inability to carry the series is the least of the reasons "Nikki" is a painful to watch garbage dump. If I had a "Hate, Hate, Hate" book like Roger Ebert, this show would certainly be in there.Cox is not without comic ability, "Norm" and "Unhappily" proved she can deliver a deadpan one-liner as well as anybody. But you could put brilliant comic actors in the lead here and the show would still be a disaster. It was an ill-conceived series from the get-go. The smartest and safest way to approach a star vehicle with an unproven star would have been to spin off her brains-and-beauty Tiffany character from "Unhappily" out into college or the working world. That, people would have watched. But no. Creator Bruce Helford with longtime teammate Deborah Oppenheimer (both of star vehicles as "The Drew Carey Show") do all the legwork to contrive this hokey new idea. Cox plays a Las Vegas showgirl living in a rundown apartment with her deadbeat wrestler husband Dwight (Nick Von Esmarch). Both have big dreams and as they scrape miserably to achieve them, hilarity ensues – at least for the laugh-track, some of us humans may need to be talked off a ledge after a viewing.The sloppy writing, having none of the bite of "Unhappily", is chained to the show's go-nowhere premise – it nothing more than a half-thought-out mechanism to get Cox in a wide variety of Las Vegas showgirl outfits. While the skimpy outfits of her former series placated the pubescent male audience just fine, Helford must have thought this would just drive them bonkers. Like everything else in the show, it's overkill. Because they don't shop and spend as much as the opposite sex, teenage boys are a demographic rarely exclusively played to on network TV (seriously) and the show-runners in the room probably had no idea what this alien life form would want.This takes me directly to another confounding misconception in this mess. Maybe the biggest in a gutter-level series like this. I have to wonder whose idea it was for our hot young sexpot to be married. The show falls in with a dozen other sitcoms in which the fat slob is blessed with a hot wife and takes it for granted. While it is not blindly followed conventional network wisdom that this has to be the set-up so the schleps that watch TV can cathartically fantasize about getting a hot wife of their own, I hope there was at least one voice at the planning table who thought keeping their sex symbol single and available was a better idea.I'm reminded of the classic "The Simpsons" episode "Homer's Barbershop Quartet" where his agent tells Homer not to wear his wedding ring on the road because "women will want to have sex with you and we want them to think they can". I'm stunned real networks so rarely think like this. It's a shallow business, but even worse is a shallow series that doesn't know that it is shallow and expects us to go through these hum-drum motions.½

jeff-223 This is on daytime tv here in Aus at the moment, and I have to say that this show is one of the hilights of my daytime tv viewing. I am not a big fan of US sitcoms, but the actors and their characters are actually quite engaging in this one.That is what makes a sitcom - the actors, and they really are all quite well suited to the characters here. I don't like wrestling, yet I find the wrestling situations funny in this show, I don't particularly like dancing/cabaret shows yet I also find this quite funny in this show. Definitely funny and worth watching.and to add the lame comment at the end, there a very few actors sexier than that Susan Egan. Phwoarrr :-)

lalazulu "Nikki" is the biggest load of rubbish that I have ever seen. The fact that the same channel in Australia that bought this tripe bought the equally as terrible "Girlfriends" says a lot, and none of it's good. I only watched this show once, and that was enough. The only saving grace are the occassional humourous 'I'm a big dumb idiot' comments that we get from Dwight. Nikki Cox doesn't seem to understand the concept of comic timing - and as a result her jokes often fall flat. Where is the director on this set? He/she ought to be shot. As should the writers, producers, actors, and all the people in the WB offices that allowed this 'show' to go to air. Even re-runs of Burgo's Catch Phrase (you Aussies out there know what i'm on about) would be better. Nikki (and her huge breasts in tight tshirts) can go elsewhere, as far as I'm concerned. THIS SHOW BITES!