Kevin James is well known for being one of Adam Sandler’s closest friends and regular collaborators, and he’s become an integral part of the Happy Madison Productions machine ever since making his feature film debut in 50 First Dates as Factory Worker. In fact, out of the 24 movies that the 55 year-old has made since then, fourteen of them have involved Sandler in some fashion either as a co-star or producer.
However, James first rose to mainstream attention in the realm of the sitcom, headlining King of Queens for nine seasons and over 200 episodes between 1998 and 2007, while he played the Doug Heffernan character for guest spots in Everybody Loves Raymond, Cosby and Becker. After a brief hiatus from the small screen, he once again led a TV comedy in CBS’ Kevin Can Wait, which was canceled after two runs in 2018.
Hoping that lightning will strike for a third time, James now stars in and executive produces Netflix‘s upcoming NASCAR-set sitcom The Crew, and based on the first trailer, it hits all of the standard tropes, jokes, plot and character beats that you’d expect from a multi-camera studio effort. It hardly promises to break new ground, but fans and genre enthusiasts might well get a kick out of it.
The Crew follows a fictional NASCAR unit that’ve been together for years, before the owner retires and hands over control of the team to his daughter, who naturally and inevitably butts heads with the zany cast of supporting players. Those in search of any sort of originality might want to look elsewhere, but it appears as though Netflix‘s quest for world domination has now extended into the realm of star-powered sitcoms.