100 Favorite Shows: #32 — Cheers
“You can never be unfaithful to your one true love. You always come back to her.”
When Cheers debuted on the last day of September in 1982, it was a ratings disaster. Finishing in nearly last place across all four networks, today’s industry would have seen the workplace comedy (set in the “Cheers” bar in Boston, Massachusetts) axed instantly. Instead, NBC gave it enough to space to grow and grow until it became one of the most acclaimed and beloved series of all-time. Running for eleven seasons and churning through cast overturn (though, never weakening from it), Cheers set the gold standard for what workplace comedies could be. Created by Glen and Les Charles and James Burrows and starring Ted Danson as Sam “Mayday” Malone, the owner of the bar and a former Red Sox relief pitcher (as well as a former alcoholic), Cheers’ influence is still felt today.
(This essay contains spoilers for Cheers, M*A*S*H, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and Parks and Recreation.)
The best theme song in the history of television belongs to Cheers. “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” by Gary Portnoy is not just an allusion to the Cheers tradition of shouting, “Norm!” whenever Norm Peterson (George Wendt) showed up. It was also an ode to what the world loved about television. It was a medium you could revisit every week and see all the friends you’d come to love. It wasn’t just Norm and Cliff (John Ratzenberger) coming to the bar where everyone knew their names. It was all of us. Granted, I didn’t grow up with Cheers and I wasn’t born until years after it ended in 1993. When I came to it years later, I still felt like an old friend of the patrons and staff. Everyone knew my name on Cheers. It was a place to go after a long day and hang out and shoot the shit over a bowl of peanuts.
Truth is, this is how I’ve felt about many shows — that everyone knows my name when I pop by warm comfort zones, like Scranton office buildings or Pawnee government halls or Boston bars. What made Cheers special was its pioneering status; many of my favorite shows couldn’t have existed without the mighty influence of Cheers.
The best example of Cheers’ high levels of influence and innovation comes in the episode, “Bar Wars VII: The Naked Prey,” from the series’ final arc. It’s not the best Gary’s Olde Towne Tavern episode, nor is it the best Harry the Hat (Harry Anderson) episode, but it was the one that combined both recurring stories magnificently.
Over the years, Sam and the Cheers gang always feuded with Gary’s Olde Towne Tavern, which had no trouble getting the best of the beloved gang at Cheers. They were also consistently duped by Harry the Hat, a sleight-of-hand-oriented thief who never seemed to mean any ill-will. In “Bar Wars VII,” however, the two recurring characters converge after Gary (Joel Polis) renders the Cheers bar unusable on St. Patrick’s Day with an impenetrable wall of cement. Sam then begs Harry to help them, but Harry refuses, leading Sam to think that Carla (Rhea Perlman) ordered the bulldozing of Gary’s Olde Towne Tavern. It’s then Gary’s turn to reveal that the bulldozing was his own doing as he was offered inordinate amounts of money from a developer of a new shopping center. Who’s the developer? Harry the Hat, of course. Only, he’s not a developer at all. Then, it’s Gary’s turn to run from the bar with terror in his eyes.
By combining two of the most fun recurring characters, Cheers managed to come up with an idea in their eleventh season that made the two conflicts seem just as fresh as when they were first introduced. The show was still creative, still topping itself until the very end. And the grandiosity of the schemes, coupled with their intricate plotting (the Harry the Hat story line in “Bar Wars VII” left fans in the dark as to what was happening to the Cheers gang, as opposed to earlier sitcoms which had the characters spell out their intended pranks and schemes. For example, the pranks are documented beforehand when B.J., Hawkeye, and Houlihan toy with Charles Winchester on M*A*S*H or when Ricky would whisper to Fred how he planned to get back at Lucy on I Love Lucy), gave a template for other sitcoms to find their own recurring episodes that fans would look forward to.
Would we have the J. Walter Weatherman episodes of Arrested Development without the Harry the Hat moments on Cheers? Could we have had myriad Halloween Heists on Brooklyn Nine-Nine if it wasn’t for the endless Boston dalliances with Gary? Perhaps not. Cheers was more than just an impeccably-introduced sitcom that revolutionized the workplace comedy and the hangout comedy (as if this wouldn’t be enough); it gave a path forward for comedies to revisit the old hits in new ways. Seeing Harry the Hat defeat Gary is just as satisfying as seeing Jake Peralta use the Halloween Heist to unleash a marriage proposal. We have Cheers to thank.
That’s what I tried to keep in mind when I revisited the bar for this television project. Even though there are other comedies I’ll always love more, Cheers was a necessary stop along the way to get to that point. (For example, we rarely saw the home lives of the Cheers gang — they were always in the bar. This wasn’t a new concept, but it was easily the most successful.) When it was on the air and releasing new episodes, those stories were never seen before. That’s important to keep in mind, too, even if there are many shows I find funnier.
That’s not to say Cheers wasn’t funny, though. It was often riotously so. Norm was likable, entrusted to close up the bar despite only being a patron, and always had the perfect punchline. (My mother is partial to, “What’s shaking, Norm?” “All four cheeks and a couple of chins.”) Lilith (Bebe Neuwirth) could subvert her robotic, seeing-Cheers-as-an-occupational-hazard persona for the occasional stellar quip. (“It’d be a good idea if you…were to sing and dance and use some of your natural talents to entertain people.” “Oh my god, someone died, didn’t they?”) Every line from Woody (Woody Harrelson) was guaranteed to conjure a laugh from me, what with his farm boy background and the starry-eyed treatment from other characters who thought he was ever so cute and dumb. (His voicemail to Sam about the message Diane left remains a shining moment for Woody, when it eventually ends with, “I’ve been thinking, Sam. I do love ya.”)
For all of the recurring plots on Cheers, the characters were the best part because, at its core, Cheers was character-driven. We cared about the characters the most, so that’s where we received all of our laughs. Diane (Shelley Long) — with her prototype Rachel Green-esque arc of a stranger coming to town to kick off the series’ story and many of its episodes — could wring laughs just from an appearance. (Her showing up to Thanksgiving dressed as a pilgrim is exactly the kind of thing Carla would slam the door in her face over.) How intellectual and well-formed her character was only enabled the others to thrive off the straight character.
Against Diane, Frasier’s (Kelsey Grammer, introduced in an unexpectedly blasé manner for such an all-time character) intellectualism is shown to be slightly more fragile. (He snaps over Norm’s reference to a thermometer as a “pop thing.”) Like Parks and Recreation’s Chris Traeger later would, Frasier’s smarts lead him through the ringer of intense depression and emotional entropy. Juxtaposed against Diane and her ability to thrive off the bar, Frasier almost seemed to exude symptoms of withdrawal when forced to endure the occasional “slumming it” vibe of the underground Cheers bar. The closer he grew with its patrons and employees (and, as my father pointed out, his unlikely romantic rivalry turned friendship with Sam), the more comfortable he became with the swill that was just as prevalent in Boston as the academia he’d always known.
Conversely, Cliff’s pseudo-academia is able to be put in check by Diane because no one at the bar (aside from Carla in moments) could properly challenge the obnoxious know-it-all nature of Cliff. With Diane came Frasier, but with Diane also came new shades for the Cheers patrons in which to see each other (like Cliff). (I always saw Cliff’s Boston accent as over-the-top until I met someone from deep in Southie.) For all of the perceived frustration derived from Diane, she was responsible for injecting depth into what could have been an unnecessarily flat world.
It also helped that all the characters played off each other so well, beyond just Diane. (It’s what makes me wish she could have met Rebecca (Kirstie Alley), who provided a different type of will-they/won’t-they dynamic with Sam, in that she distinctly wouldn’t (her sights were set on Robin Colcord), before turning into the definition of a “hot mess.”) Sam Malone was not just cool and confident around Diane; he was like that with everyone. If Norm and Cliff had a back-and-forth, it was typical to see Sam in the back with his leg up on the bar, unable to stifle his laughter. (Allusions to his baseball career were also always delightful. He acknowledges that he was no star reliever in the MLB when one unnamed patron shouts back, “Yeah you were, Sammy!”) Carla was never expressing visceral hatred for only Diane. (She’s put through emotional hell during Diane’s final episode, “I Do, Adieu,” across decades, desperate for Sam not to marry her.) It was also for Cliff and Paul (Paul Vaughn) and Eddie LeBec (Jay Thomas) and Nick Tortelli (Dan Hedaya). Even the characters she loves (and she probably has some love for Diane) are not immune to her teasing. (Carla can hardly wait two seconds before revealing to the bar that Sam feels “squooshy” around Diane.)
Diane was also able to throw it some killer jokes. (“Make your point, Sam” when he acknowledges everything she’s failed at in her life always elicits a true belly laugh from me.) It’s just that Cheers recognized Long’s ability to make a serious moment hang and matter so much more because she had learned how to relax a little bit around people she’d have never intended to meet.
Many of the show’s serious conversations took place in the adjoining billiards room, like when Diane addresses the potential for publication with Sam in the aforementioned departure episode for the character at the end of season five. By now, Diane was as exhausted as she was exasperated, but she had accepted that the strongest love she’d felt in her life was for Sam. So why would she ever want to leave him?
It’s a question she convinces herself to accept the undesirable answer to. Diane outwardly rejects the publication of her book in favor of staying in the bar until Sam pushes her to follow her dream. “See you in six months,” she tells him, finally relenting and deciding to pursue publication. “Have a good life,” Sam says, once to her and once to himself. He’s at peace with the knowledge that Diane’s not coming back. Earlier in the episode, he envisioned a fantasy of Diane and himself living into old age together. When they next return to Old Sam and Old Diane, they’re dancing together in silence, destined only to live in Sam’s imagination. She’s happy in his imagination, but if she stayed in the bar and lived a normal life, she’d never be happy for herself. The acceptance in Danson’s face and the knowing cluelessness in Long’s were both pantheon-level masterstrokes as Diane stepped away from the bar. The audacity of acknowledging that Cheers was no place for Diane and severing the “will they” of Sam and Diane’s all-time great relationship (so much so that it became a touchstone for Peter Quill in the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel) still floors me. The show was doing this in the ’80s when characters were expected to live happily ever after!
It just illustrates how important Danson and Long were to the show. As much as it seems preposterous to say that their talents were unsung on Cheers, considering they were the series’ leads, I do believe it. They received tons of proper praise, but it’s still underestimated how much they were called upon to do throughout the show. The favorite characters of many ranged from Woody (he’s my favorite) to Norm to Carla. All great characters to be sure, but they’re also not called upon to carry the story arcs as much as they are called upon for comedic relief. Danson and Long may not have gotten the best lines, but they were the leads for a reason: they carried the emotional, romantic heft of the show in its first five seasons (before the show relaxed to add Danson into the ensemble as a ringleader of the beer-based circus).
For all the vitality they brought to Cheers, though, it’s hard not to see Coach (Nicholas Colasanto) as the heart of the show. Gullible and simple (but equipped with a baseball memory that can recall images of Charlie Spikes in an instant), Coach filled the role of the “sweet and dumb” character (in a mode that Cheers would perfect and Michael Schur — ever reverential to the NBC sitcom — would expand upon with figures like Andy Dwyer and Jason Mendoza) when it came to humor, but he also grounded the bar in life. Coach may have been easily tricked, but he recognized what was important in life and those sentiments were pervasive to the rest of the cast. (The moment in “Coach’s Daughter” when he finally convinces his daughter, Lisa (Allyce Beasley), that she’s just as beautiful as her mother remains an all-time tear-jerker.)
The presence of Coach on the show never faded. Even though the Cheers I think of has Woody behind the bar with Sam, it was never in doubt how important the memory of Coach and of Colasanto was to the show’s cast and creative team. In “Thanksgiving Orphans,” Sam gives a toast to Coach. In the final scene of Cheers, Colasanto receives a tribute in the form of Sam straightening the bar’s picture of Geronimo (which originally hung in Colasanto’s dressing room). His presence was always felt and he was deeply missed from the show’s ensemble, even though Woody managed to fill the void far better than anyone who stepped in for a deceased actor was ever able to do.
Like Coach, Woody was simple, but he was different from Coach just enough to make the transition amazingly seamless. Coach was a veteran with occasional spurts of wisdom; Woody was a young buck whose wisdom was accidental. Woody came to the bar with youthful energy that prompted the ever-active camerawork to follow him with rapidity around the bar (and to pan out when he hopped over the bar in one swift motion). (Cheers always had impressive stuntwork, though. From bar-hopping to characters moving in sync with one another to the massive food fight unleashed in “Thanksgiving Orphans” after Diane slides into frame with a manic, immediate, “People, people, people! Stop this immediately!”)
Woody was no Coach, but he was never trying to be. He was just Woody: junior and optimistic (“This is going to be the best Thanksgiving ever,” he repeats thrice). After all, a pen pal of Coach’s would fit right into the ensemble while also being reverent to Coach’s memory. He wouldn’t strive to replace Coach because he shared a bond with him, too (albeit an off-screen one that we never saw much of).
Woody earned the love of fans to the point where one of Cheers’ finest hours came in the series’ two-part tenth season finale, centered around Woody and Kelly’s (Jackie Swanson) wedding. “An Old-Fashioned Wedding” is a classic example of a sitcom wedding in that everything that can goes wrong does, but (as Cheers always managed) it’s one of the most hysterical comedies of error ever put to screen. It’s almost evocative of a Shakespearean comedy, even down to the use of marriage in the final moments.
After the minister dies, the Cheers gang (transplanted into the venue’s kitchen, rather than the bar) springs into action to save Woody’s big day. Sam runs the show and directs Frasier to give marriage advice to Uncle Roger (Milo O’Shea), Lilith to entertain the guests (to the tune of A-flats and “Make ’Em Laugh”), Cliff to sew Woody’s pants, Carla and Norm to take care of the body, and Rebecca to ice the cake (“Why do I always get the hard part?”). The entire ordeal features intentionally (and ingeniously) introduced story devices in the guard dogs, a flash camera, revolving doors in the kitchen, a dumbwaiter, an enraged German officer, the threat of gangrene, “a store-bought princess,” Norm’s body as a blockade, a drunk uncle (not Bobby Moynihan), a snobby chef, a mistrusting father-in-law, a can of Pringles, and the flirtatious Cousin Monika (Colleen Morris) (Rebecca enables Sam’s sexual interest by tossing him a rag with a hilariously annoyed glance). It’s classic sitcom fodder, but it unfolds so quickly and hilariously that it almost feels like a thrill, even with the prevailing takeaway from the episode being how far the Cheers group was willing to go in order to make Woody happy. They worked together for their friend because they loved Woody just as much as they loved Coach.
From Colasanto’s untimely death to Long’s departure for the big screen, Cheers experienced a ton of cast shake-ups over the years. But for every Diane and Coach lost, Cheers was always keen to add regular characters, like when they expanded Cliff’s role, cemented Frasier’s status, and segued into Rebecca’s era of the show. Cheers managed to show that they could lose one of the show’s stars and still survive, a feat only M*A*S*H had done before (with Trapper John). While they probably couldn’t have afforded to lose Danson, Cheers lasted at a high clip for far longer than anyone could have reasonably expected. I credit this to Danson, but I also credit it to Wendt (and obviously to the writing staff on the show).
Cheers’ proof that they could withstand Diane’s departure (and Coach’s death) leads me to think that they could have weathered the loss of any character, save for Sam and Norm. Cliff would’ve hardly been missed. Carla was one we rooted to outgrow the bar. Frasier’s pastures were growing a brighter green by the second. And while Sam was an obvious choice to be untouchable, I have to say the same for Norm. He was the everyman on the show. In a way, Norm was the avatar for the audience. When he was welcomed to the bar, so were we — invited to sit at the end and have a good time while the shenanigans unfolded around us. Norm was rarely called in for plot-heavy stories on the show, but this suited Wendt fine. As an audience avatar, Norm was an excellent pillar of Cheers’ grandest theme: sometimes it’s enough to be happy where we are.
Diane, Frasier, and Lilith find a greater calling outside of the bar, yes, but Sam, Norm, Woody, Cliff, Carla. They’re all happy right where they are. This is counter-intuitive to a prevailing theme in many stories (Moana and Community come to mind most immediately) that says characters must be rooted for to grow beyond their everyday routines and find a larger purpose to their lives. Growth often equates to leaving the “normal” behind. Never quite on Cheers, though. You never felt bad for Sam that he was spending his days in the bar while Diane was out having an illustrious career. That was the right choice for Diane, but it was not for Sam. As Norm tells him (and, yes, it had to be Norm) in the finale, his true love is the bar. It’s Cheers. It’s the time he spends there and the joy to life he found in the place that was the opposite of where he “should” have been.
It’s why Sam never goes away with Diane. Not in “I Do, Adieu” and not in “One for the Road.” He just can’t commit to leaving the bar. Cheers became more than just the show’s setting, too. It made it seem like working in a bar could be such fun, but it was also a home. Every era, every time, every place — they all have their own group of friends. In a Boston bar in the 1980s, this was that group, just as it was for a Los Angeles loft in the 2010s or a New York coffee shop in the 1990s. We have our groups, too, just like the gang on Cheers (and, as those opening credits suggest, our pals were not the first friend group to spend their time at the Cheers bar). Every time those chords strike up the screen again, it feels like we’re revisiting our own group’s heyday. We get older, we leave those heydays behind, but they’re always still there, waiting for us in our memory. It just so happened that Cheers had their memories recorded. Ready for us to always go back where everybody knows our names. Lift up the newspaper, folks. “We win!”
