King of Kensington also focuses on the clash of cultures between Cathy and Gladys, King's rather stereotypical Jewish mother, and between Cathy's needs and Larry's willingness to help anybody. The topical references provided the show with some edginess, as did the working-class realism of the sets, costumes, and dialogue. Larry came from a well-known Toronto high school, yet was willing to try foods like curry just then coming into popularity in the city. The fact that King was easygoing, a little overweight, and an average guy made him a very appealing protagonist.

     In the second season, the topical political references disappeared, largely as a result of CBC audience research that signaled that they were not very popular. That meant, among other things, that the next four seasons would be more easily syndicated. On the other hand, the ethnic stereotypes were gradually taking on more rounded characteristics. However, despite the fact that Nestor was one of the few visible minorities in Canadian television drama and Tony was one of the few Italians, they were written out in the third season. A bigger problem for the writers was that Fiona Reid (who played Cathy) wanted to return to the theater. She told interviewers she was reproached even years later by people she passed on the street for leaving King. The third season episode "Cathy's Last Stand," in which she left, is one of the best in the series­ touching, a little funny, and a reprise of her history on the show, as she talks about her various unsuccessful efforts to define herself separately from King's huge persona. In a nice twist, it is established that she is leaving him, not because she doesn't love him any more, but because he gives so much of himself to everyone else he leaves little time for her. That characteristic is, of course, the basis for many of the show's comic situations, an intrinsic part of Larry King.

     In the fourth season, Gladys marries her friend Jack who takes over the store, and King becomes the athletic director of the Kensington Community Centre. King finds a girlfriend in Tina, and life goes on. There are mediocre episodes (the Christmas episode in which everyone is snowbound in a restaurant and a pregnant woman gives birth) and better, more innovative ones (the episode in which King finds out that the tough school teacher he dreaded is both fair and a good teacher). Episodes center on topics and individuals such as night classes for immigrants, the pride of an old man struggling with impotence, a nude model in a life drawing class, a controversy about a dance for gay people, and an alderman who, in a 1979 episode, thinks the center is controlled by "a deviant ethnic conspiracy." In the decade of M*A*S*H and All in the Family, and in the context of the CBC's own tradition of topical dramas, the series did not abandon its sense of Toronto as a rapidly changing cultural, racial, ethnic, and sexually diverse mix nor its wry means of addressing relevant social issues.

     The series ended with a poor young couple, the Cortinas, wanting to buy the store, but denied credit. Gladys leaves, at King's urging, to a retirement haven in Florida with Jack. King's father, a self-made success, is referred to when King obtains a second mortgage for the Cortinas and decides to continue to live in the apartment, paying them much-needed rent and not really leaving Kensington at all. Viewers who loved the series found this an appropriate conclusion with a hint of an open ending. No more episodes, no spin­ offs, no movies of the week or reunions ever revived King of Kensington. But it remains one of the mrn;t fondly remembered series in Canadian television history.