Neil Patrick Harris’ first apparent attempt to escape the shadow of his breakout role in “Doogie Howser, M.D.” sadly crashed and burned. His hit medical series ended in 1993, and after several years of mostly playing TV guest roles, Harris became a lead cast member of NBC’s forgotten ’90s sitcom, “Stark Raving Mad.”
Harris played young anxious germophobic editor, Henry McNeeley, who is forced to work with eccentric horror novelist Ian Stark (Tony Shalhoub). Critics at the time complimented Harris’ performance, but few of them raved about the series. TV critic, Dana Gee, wrote that the show’s quality was a clear step down from NBC’s other hit sitcoms “Frasier” and “Friends,” and predicted that it would not last long.
Gee was correct: The show’s ratings seemed high out of context, but were poor by the standards of a uniquely successful NBC line-up. It was sandwiched between higher-performing episodes of “Frasier” and “ER,” and the dip in ratings against those shows was glaring to NBC executives. “Stark Raving Mad” was eventually canceled, with only 18 episodes airing of its planned 22-episode season.
Neil Patrick Harris had not yet escaped Doogie Howser in the public eye
When “Stark Raving Mad” premiered, critics noted that Neil Patrick Harris was playing the total opposite of the character that made him famous. Doogie Howser was stunningly smart and competent, while Henry McNeeley was a helpless, anxious nerd.
Due to the sitcom’s premature cancellation, however, it would take a few more years before “Doogie Howser, M.D.” stopped being the main thing Harris was known for. His nine-season role as womanizing Barney Stinson on “How I Met Your Mother” is often credited for shaking off his innocent child star reputation, but the CBS show’s creators have indicated it was the 2004 comedy film, “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle,” that truly marked the next shift in his career.
“We had originally thought [Barney] was Belushi-esque, a fat, hard-drinking kind of character,” revealed co-showrunner Craig Thomas in a USA Today interview. “We saw Neil in ‘Harold & Kumar’ … and thought he was so hysterically, scene-stealingly funny in this interesting, dark, sort of subversive way.” The “HIMYM” role came just in time for Harris; After the failure of “Stark Raving Mad,” he was ready to give up on sitcoms altogether.
For Tony Shalhoub, ‘Stark Raving Mad’ was a brief hurdle between two major hit series
Before “Stark Raving Mad,” Tony Shalhoub starred in the “Cheers” spin-off series, “Wings,” for six seasons. Two years after “Stark Raving Mad” ended, Shalhoub would star in what is now his most famous, memorable role: The always-anxious, OCD-suffering private detective, Adrian Monk. “Monk” ran for eight seasons, and even landed a reunion movie on Peacock in 2023.
In the years since NBC cut it short, Shalhoub has rarely referenced “Stark Raving Mad” in interviews, nor have critics mentioned it much when reviewing his later work. Critic John Crook, however, noted in an early review for “Monk” that Shalhoub’s “Stark Raving Mad” role might’ve helped prepare him to his later part. Crook noted that Ian Stark shared Monk’s “prominent streak of melancholy.”
TV critic Mark Dawidziak also pointed out the connection between the two characters. He argued that Shalhoub had proven himself a good fit for Monk by first playing Ian Stark, someone who could be “at the same time endearing and annoying, ingenious and insecure, totally focused and completely distracted.” As Shalhoub would prove once again as Abe in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” he’s a master of playing someone with contradicting traits.
