The show was brought to the attention of American comedian Drew Carey, who worked with regular Whose Line? performer Ryan Stiles, a co-star on The Drew Carey Show. Carey convinced ABC to air test episodes in the United States. The show turned into an inexpensive hit and ABC kept Carey on as the host. The show ran on ABC for six seasons, benefiting from the low expectations of its Thursday night time slot, as ABC was not expected to mount a serious threat to what was then NBC's longtime Thursday dominance in the Nielsen ratings. While the network would regularly premi?re two new episodes in one night, there were several occurrences in which some episodes were skipped or postponed until a later date because of the airing of other new shows or specials.[citation needed] The American version was almost identical to the British series, though there was less rotation of games and performers (Ryan Stiles and Colin Mochrie, frequent performers on the British show, were featured in every American episode, and Wayne Brady also became a regular toward the beginning of the second American season). The sketches on the American version also tended to be longer and more drawn out than those in the British version. There was also more involvement of the host in the activities, and occasional celebrity guest appearances. While the points were arbitrarily doled out very deliberately by Anderson on the British series with the pretext that the points mattered, Carey took this to a different level on the American version by explicitly stating at the beginning and excessively throughout the episodes that the points didn't matter and would usually be correspondingly apathetic about assigning them during the show. In addition, the British version was more about improvisational theatre, which meant it would occasionally have games that were designed to show off its contestants' acting range rather than getting laughs. The British version also seemed to take more risks, airing games in which performers spectacularly failed.[citation needed] The last season of the British version in 1998, with Clive Anderson still hosting, was taped in the same Hollywood studio as the American version. This season was first broadcast only in the U.S. on the Comedy Central cable channel. Re-runs of the entire British TV series had been running on Comedy Central since the early-1990s, though some episodes were edited to remove games, rearrange games in a show, or remove potentially offensive content. Repeats of the British series moved to BBC America in April 2006; however, the network has not shown any episodes taped prior to 1994. This, combined with double-runs (two episodes aired back-to-back on a single night), results in many episodes re-airing less than a month after they were last shown. The American version was cancelled by ABC in 2003 because of low ratings; the network aired the remaining un-aired episodes in 2004. In that same year, the ABC Family cable network, which had been airing repeats of the show since 2002, began showing brand-new episodes. New episodes appeared into 2005. ABC Family also played episodes cobbled together from unused footage of older recordings from 2005 to 2006. The show also provided the inspiration for the short-lived Drew Carey's Green Screen Show, which premiered in 2004 on the WB. As of 2 October 2007, the show can be viewed on ABC Family from 12am ET to 1am ET on weekdays, unless a film or other special skips over its timeslot. In January, 2007 UK Channel Five US started broadcasting the US version, whilst on 15 October 2007, Dave started airing the UK Version, although these are edited and do not retain the original placement of advertisement breaks. The channel would only show episodes originally aired between 1993 to 1996. (less info)