Fran Drescher is the writer, creator and lead of the show, and the entire thing is full of what I can only assume is her personality and weirdness. This show about a Jewish fashion queen from Flushing, Queens who accidentally gets hired as the nanny for a Broadway producer’s three annoying kids, is auteur theory at its finest.

No, reader, The Nanny is a piece of deeply weird sitcom auteurship. The Nanny isn’t just a three-camera, studio-audience-slash-laugh-track sitcom with way too many episodes and a truly weird array of guest stars (Marvin Hamlisch, Spalding Gray, Joan Collins, Elizabeth Taylor, Pamela Anderson). My flatmates probably worried for my sanity hearing the theme song come out of my bedroom that many times in such a short period of time.

I say this as someone who has watched all 53 hours of it very recently. You’re not remembering this incorrectly, but you are remembering only a little bit of the picture. You might remember The Nanny as the sitcom with the lady with the high voice and the annoying laugh. And apparently what I thought would help me do that was watching all 146 episodes of The Nanny. I was funemployed at the time, and genuinely so – I had enough money to live on and figure out what it was I wanted to do with my life next. It wasn’t necessarily a rough period in my life, but it was a period where I was a bit creatively uninspired. I don’t know what inspired me to re-watch The Nanny but before long I found myself curled up in the mildly cold Auckland winter watching episode after episode of this sitcom from the 90s. I hadn’t considered it as a piece of entertainment, or something that you would watch consciously, more something you watched because it happened to be on.

My main memory of The Nanny was of it airing in that strange deadzone between afternoon programming for children and the news – a zone where you might have also found Food in a Minute or 5:30 with Jude. This is something I often wondered as I made my way through all the show’s six seasons last year. “Did The Nanny ever actually play in primetime in New Zealand?” Six seasons later, this is what he learned. One day last year Sam Brooks started re-watching The Nanny and didn’t stop.

The nanny season 6 episode 20