You know, there is a really specific texture
to television in the early 1980s. Oh, absolutely.
If you close your eyes right now and you just
picture a sitcom from, say, 1980 or 1981, it's
usually really bright, it's loud, and it honestly
looks kind of cheap. Yeah, it looks like it was
shot in the middle of a brightly lit supermarket.
Exactly. I mean, that's just the era of videotape.
You get that harsh, almost soap opera look where
everything feels a little too real, but somehow
a little too flat at the exact same time. Right,
right. And then September 1982 rolls around,
and NBC premieres this show about a dark sort
of subterranean bar in Boston, and it's brown.
It's shadowy. It's really quiet compared to everything
else. Yeah, the contrast was huge. You have this
washed -up relief pitcher standing behind the
bar, a graduate student who looks like she just
literally walked out of a poetry reading, and
a bunch of guys who are just sitting there. Staring
at their beers. Yeah, just staring at their beers.
It felt like a stage play, honestly. It had this
dusty, lived -in quality that was completely
out of step with the glitz and the high energy
of that era. It felt cozy, but also kind of...
Like these people didn't really have anywhere
else to go in their lives. Melancholic. That's
definitely the word I'd use for it. Clearly,
America hated it. Or I guess more accurately,
they didn't even know it existed. Yeah, I think
hated might be way too active a word. Hated implies
that they actually tuned in, watched it, and
actively rejected it. The reality, which we see
in the sources we're unpacking today, is much
worse. Oh yeah, we have the Nielsen data right
here in our stack of production notes and casting
records. And it is absolutely brutal to look
at. It really is. Premiere season. Fall 1982.
The show comes in at rank 74. And that's out
of what? Out of 77 shows on television. Wow.
74 out of 77. So it wasn't just low rated. No.
It was statistically irrelevant. It was basically
in the margin of error for the entire television
industry. It was completely invisible. I mean,
if you look at the records, the only things performing
worse were, I think. Some obscure news magazine
show and a program that had already been effectively
canceled by its network. Jeez. So functionally
speaking, this show was in dead last place. And
yet we are doing a deep dive on it today for
all of you listening because it didn't just survive
that awful first year. Not at all. It became
the absolute leviathan of the 1990s. We're talking
about Cheers. And the finale of Cheers had something
like. Wait, what was the exact number? 90 million
people. 93 million viewers. 93 million, which
is a number that simply does not exist in television
anymore. Never. That is a Super Bowl number.
That is a moon landing number. It's staggering.
So our mission for today's deep dive is to figure
out that delta. To unpack how a show with such
a simple premise, literally just people hanging
out in a bar, managed to survive cancellation,
run for 11 seasons, win 28 Emmys, and fundamentally
change the landscape of the American sitcom.
Right. What was the secret sauce? Exactly. How
to go from 74th place dead on arrival to the
defining comedy of a generation. And, you know.
We want to go beyond the basic trivia you can
find anywhere. I want to know the mechanics,
what happened in the casting, how did the writing
tackle real social issues, and why does a song
about a place where everybody knows your name
still resonate so deeply today? Well, we really
have to look at the accident. The accidents.
Yeah, because when you dig through these production
notes, the critical reception history, the oral
histories we've pulled for this deep dive, you
start to realize that Cheers is a show made entirely
out of Plan B's. Really? Literally everything.
The lead actor. Not their first choice. Wow.
The setting, not the first choice. The iconic
theme song, that was a backup. Even the know
-it -all character Cliff Clavin, he wasn't even
in the original script, right? Not a single word
of him. He was a total improv, an absolute fluke
that happened during an audition for a completely
different role. That is just amazing. So we have
this show that defied the odds, defied the ratings,
and frankly defied the logic of what a sitcom
was supposed to be in the early 80s. Where do
we even start to break this down? I think we
have to start with the creators and their original
concept, because before it was this moody, subterranean
Boston bar. The show was almost set. In a hotel.
A hotel. Like Fawlty Towers. Exactly like Fawlty
Towers. Interesting. The creative team behind
the show, Glenn and Les Charles and James Burroughs,
they were huge fans of that British model of
television. They really wanted that trapped pressure
cooker environment that a hotel provides. Just
to give you all listening some context on these
guys, Glenn and Les Charles and James Burroughs,
they had this really specific kind of funny way
of describing their own partnership, didn't they?
They did, yeah. They famously called themselves
two Mormons and a Jew. Which honestly sounds
like the setup to a joke you'd hear sitting at
the bar in Cheers. It does. But it's actually
really crucial to understanding the unique voice
of the show. How so? Well, the Charles brothers
were from the West. They were raised Mormon,
very grounded, very salt of the earth guys. And
then you have Burroughs, who was the son of Abe
Burroughs, a legendary playwright and director.
So Burroughs was basically theater royalty. He
grew up in that world. So you have this collision
of the outsider perspective of the Charles brothers
and the insider coastal sophistication of Burroughs.
So they brought different flavors to the table.
Exactly. And they wanted to create something
that felt genuinely smart. They looked at the
TV landscape at the time shows like The Love
Boat or Three's Company, which, you know, they
were fun. They were popular. They were fluff.
Total fluff. They were very light. This team
wanted to do something with the energy of a Spencer
Tracy and Katherine Hepburn movie. So they wanted
that classic screwball comedy feel. Fast dialogue,
heavy sexual tension, high emotional stakes between
the leads. Right. And initially they thought
a hotel was the perfect place to do it. But they
ran into a major structural problem almost immediately
during development. I think I can guess what
it is. In a hotel, the guests eventually have
to leave. They check out. Exactly. You cannot
build a long -term emotional relationship with
a guest character because by the end of the half
-hour episode, they are gone. Right. And if you
just keep bringing the same jests back every
week, it gets really weird, really fast. The
audience starts asking, why is this guy staying
at this random hotel for three straight months?
Yeah, unless you're going for some sort of full
surrealism, you need a logical reason for people
to stay in one room. Exactly. So they realized
they needed a place where people naturally lingered,
a place where you could have your core cast trapped
together, meaning the employees, but where strangers
could wander in and out and regulars could essentially
live there without it being weird. And that logic
led them directly to the idea of a neighborhood
tavern. It did. And specifically, if we look
at their production notes, they were heavily
influenced by an old radio program. Oh, right.
I saw a note here in our sources about Duffy's
Tavern. Yes. This is such a great deep cut. Duffy's
Tavern was this incredibly popular radio show
from the 1940s, and the premise was functionally
identical to Cheers. Really? Yeah. It centered
around a bartender, a colorful cast of regulars,
and this prevailing philosophy of the average
man. The creators realized that a bar operates
as what sociologists call a third place. A third
place. Meaning it's not your work and it's not
your home. Right. It's the place you go to actively
avoid both of those other places. Which makes
perfect sense and actually explains why the set
design looks the way it does. We talked earlier
about it being dark and shadowy. They didn't
want a bright TV bar. They wanted a hideout.
Exactly. They actively scouted real physical
bars to get that specific vibe and their location
scouting is fascinating. They looked in Barstow,
California. Like Barstow? Yeah. Out in the desert.
They also seriously looked at Kansas City, Missouri.
Why not just set the show in Kansas City? Or
Barstow for that matter. Why Boston? Well, they
considered it. But as they developed the characters,
they realized they needed a city that had a very
specific demographic mix. They needed a place
where a blue collar working class factory worker
or mailman could sit directly next to a Harvard
professor or a wealthy academic. And the audience
wouldn't question it. It had to feel organic.
And Boston is basically the capital of that exact
dynamic. Boston. It's a massive college town
filled. with elite institutions. But at its core,
it's also a very tough working class port city.
Right. It was the perfect Petri dish for the
kind of class war they ultimately wanted to write
about. OK, so they have the concept down. They
have the city chosen. Now they need the actual
physical. look of the place and this brings us
to the famous exterior shot the bull and finch
pub in beacon hill they found it in a phone book
didn't they literally just flipping through the
yellow pages they were looking for something
that looked english but still authentically american
they saw the little ad for the bull and finch
like the typography of the logo and just drove
over to see it And when they got there, they
particularly liked the stairs. The fact that
the entrance required you to go down a flight
of stairs from the street level. It looked like
you were descending into a cave, like a literal
hideout. Exactly. So they approached the owner.
And the deal they made with this owner, this
just kills me. Tom Kershaw. Right, Tom Kershaw.
They go up to this guy and they say, hey, we're
making a TV show. We want to use the exterior
shot of your bar. Just the outside. We're going
to film the inside on a soundstage in L .A. He
says, sure. How much did they actually pay him
for those rights? One single dollar. One dollar.
I cannot get over that. A crisp one dollar bill.
And to be completely fair to Tom Kershaw, literally
nobody knew this show was going to be a hit.
It came in 74th place. Probably just thought,
hey, free dollar and maybe a little local exposure.
Right, right. But that $1 rights deal eventually
turned the Bull and Finch into the third most
visited tourist attraction in all of Boston.
Unbelievable. We are talking millions and millions
of dollars in merchandise. T -shirts, mugs, burgers,
hats, all from a $1 contract. I really hope he
framed that dollar bill. I think he probably
framed the massive bank account statements that
started rolling in a few years later. Fair enough.
OK, so we have the physical place. Now we need
to populate it. We need the people. And this
is where the whole plan B narrative of this deep
dive really takes over the story. Oh, heavily.
Let's talk about Sam Malone. Because for me,
and I think for almost anyone listening, Ted
Danson just is Sam Malone. They are inseparable
in pop culture. It is genuinely hard to imagine
anyone else standing behind that bar. But looking
at the casting notes we have, wow. It is a completely
different picture. It's a multiverse of madness,
honestly. It really is. First off, Sam wasn't
even a baseball player in the initial pitch.
No, not at all. In the original pilot script,
the character of Sam was a former lineman for
the New England Patriots. A football player.
A football player. And because of that, the character
was written as heavier, broader, much more of
a classic meat and potatoes kind of guy. And
the network NBC, in their infinite wisdom, they
had a very specific name in mind for this role.
They wanted Bill Cosby. Stop. That breaks my
brain every time I read it. I am completely serious.
The executives at NBC formally recommended Bill
Cosby for the role of Sam Malone. That is just
aside from all the obvious retrospective reasons.
regarding Cosby's later life and legacy, just
think about the sheer energy of that choice.
Bill Cosby in the early 80s was the ultimate
authority figure. He was rapidly becoming America's
dad. He was always in control of the room. Exactly.
And that fundamental trait would have instantly
killed the premise of the show. Because the whole
point of Sam Malone is that he cannot be in control.
Sam Malone is, at his core, a loser. He's a recovering
alcoholic. He's a womanizer who constantly strikes
out and makes a fool of himself. He's a guy whose
absolute best glory days are at least 10 years
behind him. If you put a natural winner, an authority
figure like Cosby in that role, all that necessary
vulnerability just vanishes. The character doesn't
work. So the creators obviously push back against
the network on that. Who else do they seriously
look at? They got really, really close to casting
Fred Dreyer. Wait, the actual NFL player? Yeah.
He played defensive end for the Rams. He was
transitioning into acting at the time. He famously
went on to do the cop show Hunter a few years
later. Oh, right. And Dreyer was actually great
in the auditions. He fit that original football
player mold perfectly. He was tall. He was imposing.
He looked like a guy who used to tackle people
for a living. There's always a but. But he just
wasn't. Funny. Is that a fair way to put it?
I mean, he was a tough guy. Right. He was a genuine
tough guy. He simply didn't possess that frantic,
slightly pathetic, neurotic energy underneath
the surface that the comedy required. And then
in walks Ted Danson. Right. Who was absolutely
not a football player. Not even a little bit.
No. He was tall, but he was lanky. He had this
amazing, thick head of hair, but he didn't look
like an NFL lineman at all. But Danson had something
the other actors didn't have. He had incredible
range. He could play both sides. Exactly. He
could be the cool, swaggering jock when he needed
to be, but he was totally willing and able to
be the complete butt of the joke a second later.
So once they cast Danson, they realized they
had to change the sport to fit him. They did.
They looked at Danson's body type and realized
football just didn't make visual sense anymore.
So they made Sam a relief pitcher. Which, if
you think about it narratively, is actually a
much better fit for the show. How so is the difference?
Think about the psychology of the sports. A football
player is just one piece of a massive team machine.
But a relief pitcher, that is a deeply lonely
position. Oh, I see. You sit all by yourself
out in the bullpen for hours. You come into the
game at the very end. You either save the game
and become the hero or you blow it and take all
the blame. And then you go sit back down alone.
Mayday Malone. Exactly! It perfectly mirrors
the psychology of a lonely guy standing behind
a bar every night. But there was a pretty funny
catch with Danson, wasn't there? About the baseball
thing. Oh yeah. Ted Danson knew absolutely nothing
about the game of baseball. Zero. Less than zero.
He had never even been to a professional game.
He didn't know how to properly hold a fielder's
glove. That's hilarious. He literally had to
go to a specialized baseball school just to learn
how to stand and walk like a professional athlete.
And he had to go to bartending school, too, because
he had no idea how to pour beer either. See,
that is the true magic trick of acting, isn't
it? He played that sort of washed -up athletic
arrogance so flawlessly that I just always assumed
he was a jock in real life that's the burrows
touch shining through which we'll get into later
but honestly the real casting hurdle wasn't finding
sam it was finding diane shelly long shelly long
the casting directors actually wrote a note on
her file that said she was the easiest choice
and the hardest get meaning she didn't want to
do the show well she was a movie actress at the
time or at least she heavily aspired to be exclusively
a film actress You have to remember, doing a
television sitcom in 1982 was widely viewed as
a massive step down for your career if you had
any kind of feature film aspirations. Right.
The landscape was totally different back then.
TV was the minor leagues. Exactly. So she really
had to be coaxed and convinced just to show up
and read for the part. But once she was finally
in the room, it all came down to the chemistry
tests. I was reading about this part of the process.
According to the records, they took the final
three actors up for Sam and the final three actresses
up for Diane, and they just systematically mixed
and matched them to see what happened. Right.
So you ended up with these incredible what -if
pairings that could have changed television history.
Imagine this one. Fred Dreyer and Julia Duffy.
Julia Duffy. She was the actress from Newhart,
right? The one who played the really rich, spoiled
princess character. Yes, exactly. So imagine
a hulking, legitimate NFL. Tough guy. Opposite
a tiny, wealthy princess type. I mean, that's
a funny dynamic for a show, maybe. But it's definitely
not Cheers. No. Then you had another pairing
they tested, William Devane and Lisa Eichhorn.
William Devane. That would have been dark. Or
at least very dramatic. Probably way too serious.
Devane brings a very intense, dramatic energy
to his roles. He wouldn't have had the bounce
a sitcom needs. And then finally. They pair Ted
Danson and Shelley Long. And the producers noted
that the literal air in the room changed. It
wasn't just that they had romantic chemistry,
which they absolutely did. It was that they had
what the team called. Combat chemistry. Combat
chemistry. I really like that phrase. It's perfect.
They genuinely seem to annoy the hell out of
each other, but we're simultaneously incredibly
attracted to each other, and that contradiction
is the entire engine of the show. It's not a
simple I love you story. No, it's I cannot stand
you, I think you're an idiot, but I also can't
leave this room. Okay, so you have your two anchors
locked in. But a bar needs regulars. It needs
an ecosystem. And this is where that Plan B theme
we talked about really shines brightly. Let's
talk about George Wynn. The man, the myth. He
wasn't even supposed to be a main character at
all. Not even close. On the original casting
sheet, his role was just listed as George. With
a small g, practically. He was essentially just
a featured extra. Really? The pilot script just
called for Diane on her very first day as a waitress
to serve her first customer, this guy George.
And he had exactly one line of dialogue. Let
me guess the line. Beer. That's it? Just the
word beer? That was his entire audition material.
He had to walk into the room, sit down, look
generally miserable, and say the word beer. How
does an actor even crush an audition with only
one word? By doing exactly what George Wendt
did, he didn't just speak the word. He cited
out of his body. He managed to put the weight
of the entire world into that single syllable.
Wow. It was the authentic sound of a man who
has had a terrible day, a terrible week, maybe
a terrible decade, and he just needs this one
specific thing to cope. The producers laughed
so hard at his delivery that they immediately
turned to each other and realized, okay, this
guy needs to be sitting on that stool every single
week. And then there's John Ratzenberger. Honestly,
this might be my favorite story in this entire
stack of research. It is absolute Hollywood legend.
So Ratzenberger actually came in to audition
for the exact same roles George went. He auditioned
for Norm. He wanted to be the beer guy. He did.
But he walked out of the audition room knowing
in his gut that he didn't get the part. He could
just tell that Wynn had crushed it and the role
was gone. But instead of just getting in his
car and driving home, he stopped at the door,
turned back around and looked at the creators.
He just turned around. And he said to them, hey,
do you guys have a bar? No at all. That is such
an incredibly bold move for an actor, just inventing
a brand new role for yourself in the exit interview.
It takes serious nerve. The producers were kind
of confused and said, what do you mean by a bar
know -it -all? And Ratzenberger just launches
into this improvised pitch. He explains that
every neighborhood bar in America has this one
specific guy who thinks he knows everything about
everything, but actually knows absolutely nothing.
The guy who aggressively explains how a carburetor
works. But has never actually owned a car in
his life. Exactly. And he didn't just explain
the concept. He just dropped into the character
right then and there. On the spot. Totally on
the spot. He started spouting these completely
nonsense facts about, I think it was biology
or maybe geography, just complete authoritative
gibberish delivered with absolute unwavering
confidence. And it worked. The producers were
crying laughing. They went home and wrote the
character of Cliff Clavin into the pilot script
that very night. It's just genius because Cliff
and Norm ultimately act as this sort of this
grounding wire for the whole series. You have
all this high emotional drama with Sam and Diane
screaming at each other in the office about French
literature and sports. And then the camera just
cuts to Cliff. calmly explaining to Norm how
buffalo migrate across the plains. They serve
as the Greek chorus of the show. They are there
to constantly remind the audience that at the
end of the day, no matter what's happening, this
is just a bar. None of the drama happening here
is actually that important in the grand scheme
of things. I want to pivot to the writing for
a second because... You know, we look back at
Cheers now, and we mostly think about the will
-they -won't -they dynamic. We think of it as
a romance. But the source material makes a really
compelling deeper point. Cheers wasn't actually
a romantic comedy. It was a... class war oh absolutely
it was if you strip away the jokes and the sitcom
structure it is fundamentally a show about the
collision between the american working class
and the american intellectual elite with diane
representing the elite diane is the pure embodiment
of the elite she is a perpetual graduate student
she reads proust for fun she casually drops words
like corporeal and verisimilitude into everyday
bar conversation. She represents this ideal that
life should constantly be elevated and analyzed.
And crucially, she firmly believes she is better
than the bar and everyone in it. And Sam is the
opposite. Sam is the ultimate populist. He values
street smarts. He values physical ability and
charm. He genuinely thinks sitting around reading
heavy books is a waste of time for people who
can't actually do things in the real world. So
when these two are fighting, And they fight constantly.
They aren't really arguing about who forgot to
do the dishes or who looked at who. They are
fighting about what actually has value in American
society. Precisely. There's this brilliantly
written episode early on where they try to go
out to the opera together and Sam falls asleep
in the theater. Right. And Diane is just horrified.
But she's not mad because he's tired. She's furious
because his boredom is a direct insult to her
entire high culture worldview. And on the flip
side, Sam is annoyed because he's convinced she's
just faking her enjoyment of the opera just to
look smarter than everyone else. And the truly
brilliant thing about the writing here is that
the show never actually takes a side. That is
the magic key to Cheers. Think about it. Most
sitcoms would lazily make Diane the designated
smart one and Sam the designated dumb one. Or,
alternatively, they'd make Sam the cool, relatable
guy and Diane the stuck -up villain. But Cheers
did both. Yes. Diane was terribly stuck up and
pretentious. But she was also factually right
a lot of the time. Sam was uneducated and superficial,
but he possessed a deep emotional intelligence
and loyalty that Diane completely lacked. They
constantly exposed each other's deepest hypocrisy.
Which is exactly why their relationship was able
to drive the narrative for five solid seasons.
If the plot was just he thinks she's pretty and
she thinks he's handsome, the audience gets bored
in six episodes. But because the dynamic was
he fundamentally challenges her reason for existing.
It can last forever. And surrounding this massive
ideological clash, you have the rest of the bar,
the quote unquote family. Right. We mentioned
Norman Cliff, but we really have to talk about
Coach and Carla. Right. Nicholas Colasanto, who
played Coach, he was the absolute heart of the
bar. The character was, frankly, borderline senile
due to taking way too many baseballs to the head
without a batting helmet over the years. But
he was the sweet, trusting, emotional center
that grounded the cynicism of everyone else.
And then on the other end of the spectrum, you
have Rhea Perlman playing Carla Tortelli. The
ultimate cynic. If Coach was the warm heart of
the bar, Carla was the sharp teeth. She despised
Diane from day one. And that was a vital dynamic
for the writers because, honestly, the audience
sometimes hated Diane, too. Carla was the pressure
valve. Exactly. She was the audience surrogate,
constantly rolling her eyes at Diane's endless
pretension so the viewers didn't have to. And
looking at her character notes, there was this
constant running gag about her fertility and
having a million kids. That was out of pure necessity.
Rhea Perlman just kept getting pregnant in real
life during production, so rather than hiding
her behind a counter with a giant purse, the
writers just wrote it into the script. Carla
was seemingly always pregnant, which perfectly
added to her constant stress, her anger, and
her deep cynicism about life. We do have to touch
on a really sad, pivotal moment in the show's
history, though. Moving into the middle seasons,
the death of Nicholas Colasanto. Yeah, this is
a very heavy part of the show's legacy. Colasanto
had a severe heart condition, and if you watch
season three closely, you can actually see it
happening on screen. Yeah, he's losing a lot
of weight. He's visibly struggling to catch his
breath during longer scenes. It was tough. He
eventually passed away from a heart attack in
1985. Now, in a standard television sitcom, Usually
when an actor leaves a show or tragically passes
away, the writers take the easy way out. They
just have a character say, oh, he moved to Florida
to live with his sister or he got a new job in
another state. Right. They just sweep it under
the rug. But the writers on Cheers felt that
doing that would be a profound insult to the
character of Coach. Because Coach loved those
people. Exactly. Coach would never, ever voluntarily
pack up and leave his friends. They were his
whole life. So the creators made the incredibly
difficult decision. to just address the death.
This was the season four opener. The season four
opener. They come right out and acknowledge that
Coach has passed away. It was an incredibly brave,
creative choice for a light hominy in the mid
80s to just grind to a halt and say to the audience,
our friend died and we are grieving. It really
grounded the show. It firmly reminded everyone
that this wasn't just a live action cartoon.
These were supposed to be real people. And structurally,
it led directly to the introduction of Woody
Harrelson. Woody Boyd. The pen pal from Ham.
Hanover, Indiana. Wait, didn't the show make
a joke that they didn't actually exchange letters?
They literally just mailed physical pins back
and forth. Yes, that is exactly the level of
intellect we are dealing with here. Classic.
So Woody Harrelson comes in to take over the
required dumb guy slot behind the bar, but he
played it with a completely different energy.
How so? Well. Coach was old and befuddled. Woody
was young, incredibly optimistic, and just dangerously
naive. And that subtle shift changed the entire
dynamic for Sam. Instead of Sam interacting with
an older father figure or a peer, Sam suddenly
became Woody's protective big brother. It freshened
up the chemistry. It did. But the biggest, most
dangerous shakeup the show would ever face was
still coming. Season 5 ends, and Shelley Long
announces she is leaving the show. This is the
moment where, historically, 99 % of television
shows just die. Instantly. You lose your female
lead. You lose literally 50 % of the Sam and
Diane dynamic that made the show a hit in the
first place. By all conventional logic, Cheers
should have been over. So how did they survive
it? They completely reinvented the genre of the
show. They brought in Kirstie Alley to play Rebecca
Howe. And the sheer brilliance of this move was
that they did not... try to find another Diane.
Right. They didn't cast another blonde, poetry
-reading academic. No. Rebecca was the total
opposite. She was a ruthless corporate climber.
The corporation she works for buys the bar, so
she comes in as Sam's direct superior. She is
his boss. The power dynamic flipped. Entirely.
And initially, for the first few episodes, she
was presented as this icy, hyper -competent,
untouchable businesswoman. But then... Then the
writers broke her. They absolutely destroyed
her. Over the course of that season, they slowly
peeled back the layers and revealed that underneath
the shoulder pads, she was a complete neurotic
mess. She was a total disaster in her personal
life. She was deeply insecure. She was essentially
a gold digger, but she was spectacularly bad
at digging for gold. Every rich man she went
after turned out to be a creep or rejected her.
Which made her character incredibly funny, but
in a totally different way than Diane. Exactly.
And that shift fundamentally changed the DNA
of the series. It shifted from being a tense
romantic comedy into a sprawling ensemble farce.
The burden wasn't solely on Sam anymore. Right.
It wasn't just about will they or won't they
sleep together anymore. It was about this group
of lovable lunatics trying to desperately run
a business and survive their own bad decisions.
And that pivot gave the show another six solid
years of life on the network. Let's shift gears
and talk about the actual production style, because
we touched on the visual look of the show earlier
in the intro, but there is a very specific technical
reason why Cheers feels so different when you
watch it today compared to its peers. It's the
great film versus tape war of the 1980s. Break
that down for me like I'm a five -year -old.
What does that actually mean? Okay. In the 80s,
network sitcoms were almost universally shot
on videotape. Think of the visual look of All
in the Family or the Golden Girls or Family Ties.
Okay, I can picture that. It's very bright. Right.
Videotape is incredibly cheap to use. It's very
easy to edit on a quick weekly turnaround. But
it has a very distinct, flat, harsh aesthetic.
It looks like the local evening news. It looks
very immediate, like it's happening right now.
And film. What does film do? Film has actual
physical texture. It has grain. It captures and
handles shadows beautifully. It looks like a
proper movie. And subconsciously, it feels timeless
to the viewer. The creators, and especially the
director James Burroughs, aggressively insisted
on shooting Cheers on actual film. NBC hated
the idea because film costs significantly more
money to process. But Burroughs dug his heels
in and fought for it. And we are so lucky he
did because of that choice. You can queue up
an episode of Cheers today on a modern streaming
service in high... definition. And it looks rich
and beautiful. It doesn't look like some degraded
historical artifact. Exactly. The film stock
gave the Wooden Bar set this incredible inviting
warmth. And beyond just the camera format, you
have what the industry calls the Burroughs touch
in the actual directing. He was famously obsessed
with motion on the set, right? He was fanatic
about it. He had a strict, unbreakable rule for
his actors. Nobody plays a scene without a prop.
Meaning you can't just stand on your mark and
deliver your dialogue. Right. You can't just
stand still like you're in a school play. You
have to be doing something physical while you
speak. Wiping down the mahogany counter, carrying
a heavy crate of liquor from the back room, pouring
a draft beer, fixing a broken bar stool. It adds
kinetic energy to the frame. Burroughs deeply
believed that comedy lives inside the body. If
Sam Malone is feeling nervous in a scene, he
shouldn't just deliver a line saying, I'm nervous.
He should be aggressively, frantically drying
a beer mug with a towel until it practically
squeaks. It basically makes the bar feel like
a legitimate, functioning workplace rather than
just a stage set. It does. Yeah. And he cultivated
this environment where the background actors,
the extras sitting at the tables, were treated
as absolutely essential to the illusion. He would
tell his camera operators, the camera is a spy.
A spy. Meaning the camera is always watching
everything. So even if Norm isn't the one speaking
in a scene, if he happens to be visible in the
background out of focus, he still needs to be
actively reacting and performing. It creates
a living, breathing ecosystem. It does. It was
revolutionary for Sick Hums. And we cannot possibly
talk about the production of this show without
talking about the music. Yeah. I guarantee everyone
listening right now just heard those first three
piano notes playing in their head the second
I mentioned it. Oh, it's completely Pavlovian.
this point where everybody knows your name the
ultimate tv theme song but again going back to
our theme for today this was a plan b actually
it was plan c really yeah the songwriters they
hired gary portnoy and judy hart angelo they
initially wrote and submitted a song called my
kind of people and the producers rejected it
outright So they went back to the drawing board
and wrote a second song called Another Day. Also
rejected. Rejected again. The producers clearly
knew exactly what they wanted, didn't they? They
did. They kept kicking the songs back and telling
the writers, look, this show isn't about drinking
beer. It's about the feeling of belonging someone.
The concept of the likable losers. Right. They
told the songwriters they wanted a song that
sounded like it was being sung by a lonely guy
at 11 o 'clock at night who just really doesn't
want to go home to his empty apartment. So finally
they wrote, where everybody knows your name,
and if you actually pay close attention to the
lyrics in the verses, they are quite dark. Making
your way in the world today takes everything
you've got. Exactly. Taking a break from all
your worries sure would help a lot. It's fundamentally
a song about exhaustion. It's about the daily
grind of the world just beating you down. And
then the soaring chorus offers the only antidote.
Go to the place where you are known. It's essentially
a promise to the viewer. You are safe here. And
that is exactly why the show resonated. Because
1982 was a pretty scary, stressful time in America.
You had a recession. You had intense Cold War
anxiety. People wanted a bunker to hide in. Cheers
was the ultimate television bunker. And before
that comforting song even played, you had the
cold opens, the teasers. Oh, the cold opens were
so unique for the time. Often, that little two
-minute scene before the opening credits rolled
had absolutely nothing to do with the main plot
of the episode. It was almost like a sketch comedy
bit. Exactly. It was a clever way for the writers
to burn off extra standalone jokes or physical
gags that were too good to throw away, but didn't
naturally fit into the narrative. But strategically...
It trained the audience. It taught the audience
that they had to pay attention the absolute second
the show started because they were guaranteed
a solid laugh in the first 30 seconds. Now, we've
talked a lot about the fun stuff, the mechanics
of the comedy. Yeah. But looking at our source
notes, Cheers was actually not afraid to get
remarkably real. It tackled several social issues
that were considered highly taboo for a comedy
in 1982. First and foremost on that list, alcoholism.
Which is such a bold, almost counterintuitive
choice for a show set entirely inside a bar.
Sam Malone is a recovering alcoholic. That isn't
just a quirky character trait. It is his defining
psychological struggle. He owns and operates
a bar. He pours drinks for eight hours a day,
but he cannot take a single sip. That is literally
a Greek tragedy set up. It's the myth of Tantalus.
Right. The guy standing in a pool of water that
recedes every time he tries to drink. And the
show treated his addiction with deep respect.
It wasn't a punchline. There were several dramatic
moments where Sam almost fell off the wagon due
to stress. And didn't he actually relapse later
on? He did in the final season. And the writers
didn't treat it as a joke. They treated it as
a profound, serious struggle for his soul. And
then there's the episode from season one titled
The Boys in the Bar. Keep in mind, everyone,
this aired in 1982. This is a massive landmark
moment in television history. In the episode,
an old friend of Sam's comes into the bar and
eventually comes out to him as gay. Now, in 1982,
the standard sitcom playbook. would be to make
the gay character an exaggerated stereotype or
to have the main cast react with a sort of moral
disgust that the audience at home is implicitly
supposed to agree with. Right. It would usually
end in some sort of panic in the bar scenario.
And there was panic in the bar in this episode,
right? There was, but the show flips the script
entirely. Norm and Cliff and the other regulars
start freaking out. They get paranoid that Cheers
is going to become known as a gay bar and their
sanctuary will be ruined. But the brilliance
is that the joke isn't on the gay character.
The joke is on the regulars. Exactly. The script
is openly mocking Norm and Clark's homophobia
and their fragile masculinity. That is a huge,
important distinction. It actually won a GLA
Media Award. It was incredibly progressive for
the time to look at middle America and say, hey,
the people panicking about gay people existing,
they are the idiots in this scenario. It's fascinating
how the show handled feminism during its run,
too. We talked about Diane earlier, but she wasn't
the only lens they used. No, they had a whole
spectrum of feminist perspective. Diane was the
highly educated academic feminist who quoted
feminist literature. But then you had Carla,
who was the gritty, working -class pragmatist.
She didn't have time for theory. She just knew
she didn't need a man to validate her. She just
needed a paycheck to feed her kids. And then
Fraser's wife, Lilith. Lilith was the ultimate
professional equal. She operated in male -dominated
academic spaces and dominated them. And Sam was
the foil bouncing off all of them. Sam was the
aging chauvinist. He was the dinosaur trying
to survive the meteor of the feminist movement.
But importantly, the writers almost always framed
Sam's chauvinist behavior as a character flaw,
not a virtue. Right. He was frequently the butt
of the joke because of his relentless womanizing.
He was a Lothario, sure, and he scored a lot
of dates, but it rarely brought him any actual
happiness. By the end of the series, he basically
has a moment where he admits he's essentially
a sex addict. The show didn't necessarily endorse
his lifestyle. It displayed it as the exact thing
keeping him from being a complete happy human
being. It's a really delicate tightrope to walk,
making a notorious womanizer the likable hero
of your show while simultaneously critiquing
his entire worldview. It really only worked because
Ted Danson played him with such intense vulnerability.
You always, always knew that Sam was compensating
for a deep inner sadness. All right, let's fast
forward a bit in the timeline. We started this
deep dive talking about the show being dead last,
74th place, complete failure. How on earth did
we get from that point to the massive 90s juggernaut
it became? The turning point, surprisingly, was
the summer off season. Reruns. Specifically,
Thursday night reruns. The head of programming
at NBC at the time was a guy named Brandon Tartikoff,
and he passionately believed in the creative
quality of Cheers. He absolutely refused to cancel
it, despite the horrible ratings. Never him.
So in the summer of 1983, when all the other
networks were airing garbage and there was no
new competition, NBC just stubbornly kept airing
Cheers reruns. It's basically a strategy of attrition.
We're going to keep broadcasting this show into
your living room until you sit down and like
it. And it worked. People were home. They were
flipping channels out of summer boredom. And
they finally stopped and listened to the dialogue.
They got completely hooked on the underlying
tension of the Sam and Diane storyline. When
season two premiered that fall, the ratings massively
jumped. Right. And they just kept climbing. By
season nine, it was the undisputed number one
show in America. And that leads us to the finale,
which, I mean, those numbers are just staggering
to look at today. May 20th, 1993. The series
finale drew 93 million viewers. I just want to
pause and put that in context for everyone listening.
That is nearly one third of the entire United
States population at that time, all sitting down
at the exact same hour to watch the exact same
thing. It aired right after the season finale
of Seinfeld, too. It was essentially a national
holiday. Bars across the country hosted viewing
parties. And the awards shelf for the creators
must have been literally buckling under the weight.
117 Emmy nominations over its run. 28 wins. But
this is the most impressive stat. It was officially
nominated for Outstanding Comedy Series for all
11 seasons it was on the air. That kind of sustained
critical consistency over a decade is almost
unheard of in television. It's incredibly rare.
But the reality is, the show didn't really end
in 1993, did it? Because the Cheers -iverse immediately
expanded. The cultural footprint, the Cheers
effect, was massive. First, obviously, of the
direct spinoffs, Everyone Knows Frasier. Which
was arguably just as critically and commercially
successful as The Parent Show. They moved Kelsey
Grammer's character to Seattle, completely changed
his surrounding cast, and it ran for another
11 seasons. Which is just insane when you think
about his origins. Frasier Crane was initially
written to be a minor, temporary roadblock character.
He was just Diane's rebound guy to keep her and
Sam apart for a few episodes. And he ended up
being continuously on television for 20 consecutive
years. But before the massive success of Frasier,
there was. A pretty big failure, wasn't there?
Ah, yes. The Tortellas. Right. Carla's sleazy
ex -husband, Nick Tortelli, got his own spinoff
show. He did. And it, well, it did not go well.
No. It was swiftly canceled after just 13 episodes.
Critics hated it. It was heavily criticized for
leaning into cheap Italian -American stereotypes.
And honestly, the characters were just fundamentally
unpleasant to spend 30 minutes with without the
grounding presence of the Cheers bar to balance
them out. A rare swing and a miss for that creative
team. Then later you had Wings, which technically
existed in the exact same television universe.
Characters from Cheers like Cliff and Norm would
occasionally pop up at the Nantucket airport
on that show. But the pop culture legacy goes
way beyond just official network spinoffs. I'm
a bit of a video gamer in my spare time, and
I was absolutely delighted to find this little
detail buried in our source notes. Fallout 4.
Yes, the massive post -apocalyptic video game.
The game is set in the irradiated ruins of Boston.
And if you explore the wasteland, you can actually
find a ruined pub called the Prost Bar. And Prost,
of course, is a German word used for cheers.
Right. And if you walk inside this ruined building
in the game, it is an exact, loving, physical
replica of the cheers set layout. But the developers
added a really dark, brilliant little detail.
There are two posed skeletons permanently sitting
at the corner of the bar right where Norm and
Cliff sat for 11 years. And one of the skeletons
is still wearing a tattered U .S. mailman uniform.
It is a very glim but very touching tribute.
And references to the show are just everywhere.
The Simpsons famously spoofed the premise with
the Flaming Mose episode, and they had an episode
where almost the entire original cast came in
to voice their animated characters. How I Met
Your Mother had that running, swirly gag that
ended with the theme song. Even in modern cartoons,
like Adventure Time the Ice King character, whose
mind has been destroyed by magic, routinely sings
the Cheers theme song to himself as a coping
mechanism because it's the only comforting thing
he remembers from the world before the apocalypse.
That is actually profoundly sad. The idea that
where everybody knows your name is the very last
scrap of humanity you cling to when the world
ends. It speaks perfectly to the ultimate comfort
level of the show. And meanwhile, in the real
world, The actual physical bar in Boston is still
there, operating every day. It is. It eventually
officially rebranded itself as Cheers Beacon
Hill to capitalize on the tourism. But the show
became such a massive cultural force during its
run that actual real life political figures wanted
to be seen there. Real politicians. Oh, yeah.
John Kerry, Michael Dukakis, even Tip O 'Neill,
who was the sitting speaker of the House at the
time. They all made cameo appearances on the
show playing themselves. It was a definitive
signal that Cheers had become a true Boston institution.
It was seen as being just as cultural. truly
important to the city as the Red Sox or the Boston
Tea Party. That is wild. So let's try to bring
this all home. We've unpacked the bumpy history,
the crazy casting what -ifs, the visual style,
the deep social themes. But at the end of the
day, why does it endure? Why are we sitting here
deeply analyzing a sitcom that went off the air
over 30 years ago? I think it really comes down
to its pioneering concept of the found family.
Cheers wasn't actually a show about drinking
beer. No. It was a show about a random group
of people from completely different, isolated
walks of life. A mailman who lives with his mother,
a snooty psychiatrist, a bitter waitress, an
aging ex -athlete who inexplicably found each
other and accepted each other. Even though they
didn't always actually like each other. They
almost never liked each other. They insulted
each other constantly, but they accepted each
other's flaws, and most importantly, they always
showed up. Every single day. That famous line
from the song, where everybody knows your name,
it's not just a lyric, it's a powerful emotional
promise. It is, and there is a really profound,
somewhat beautiful irony in the final scene of
the finale. Think about Sam Malone's entire arc.
He spends 11 seasons desperately chasing women,
chasing social status, constantly trying to find
the one to make his life complete. And in the
very final moments of the series, after everyone
else has gone home, he realizes that his true
love isn't Diane. It isn't Rebecca. It isn't
any woman. It's the bar itself. It's the physical
bar and the community of people inside it. The
last scene is someone knocking on the door from
the street after hours, and Sam just looks up
and says, sorry, we're closed. He straightens
a picture, walks to the back room, and chooses
the sanctuary of the place over the chaos of
the world outside. Which is actually a really
beautiful, slightly melancholic, but incredibly
honest ending. It is. It's the absolute perfect
resolution for that specific character. Well,
before we wrap up today's deep dive, I have a
final... Slightly provocative thought for all
of you listening to Chuan. Earlier, we talked
about how Cheers basically popularized the serialized
storyline in comedy, that long will -they -won't
-they narrative arc that spanned across multiple
seasons. Right. Now, according to the notes,
the creator Les Charles actually deeply regretted
starting that trend later in his life. He feared
that those long serialized stories actively alienated
casual viewers who might just be tuning in for
the first time. He really thought it made the
barrier to entry too high. He wanted the episodes
to be purely episodic. You watch one, you get
a complete story, you go to bed. Exactly. But
if you look at how we consume television today
in the modern age of Netflix and Hulu and obsessive
binge watching, was Cheers accidentally the grandfather?
of the modern streaming model. Oh, that is a
fascinating connection to make. Right. Did they
inadvertently train audiences in the 80s to expect
and demand long -form, complex character storytelling
in their half -hour comedies? I mean, you really
can't watch a show like The Office or Parks and
Recreation today without intimately understanding
the long, multi -season relationship arcs. Cheers
basically proved to the nervous network executives
that audiences were actually smart enough to
stick around for the long haul. They were executing
complex, bingeable narrative arcs decades before
the technology even existed to actually binge
them. Maybe that is exactly why the show still
works so seamlessly today. It was accidentally
built for the future of television. It's definitely
something to think about the next time you finish
a season of a comedy and immediately hit that
next episode button. And with that, that is all
for our deep dive into the fascinating, shadowy
world of Cheers. Thanks so much for listening,
everyone. Cheers.