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**Shelley Long ** (Diane Chambers): I was doing the movie _Night Shift _when I read Cheers.
Glen Charles: We wanted to introduce the bar and the people in it through Diane's eyes. Burrows and the Charles' brothers subjected the finalists-Shelley Long, Ted Danson, former football player Fred Dryer ( Hunter), William Devane ( Knots Landing), Julia Duffy ( Newhart) and film actress Lisa Eichhorn-to a grueling month of audtions, with Long and Danson the ultimate winners. The first parts to be cast were reformed alcoholic and unrepentant babe hound Sam Malone-who was originally conceived as a "Stanley Kowalski type"-and Diane Chambers, the newly dumped know-it-all who, in the pilot, is reduced to waiting tables at Cheers.
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I'd never seen anything like that on TV before-just guys sitting around, talking. This is about a family it just happens not to be a group of brothers and sisters."īurrows: When I got the first draft of the pilot from Les and Glen, I said to my wife, "Oh, my God, these guys have brought radio back to television." They had written this smart, intellectual story. "What kind of show would be in a bar? How do we handle all the alcohol?" But the Charles brothers very clearly said, "This isn't about the place. Michael Zinberg (development ecutive, NBC): When they came in and, you could feel the room shudder. That wasn't what we had in mind at all, but we thought that would get the thing rolling. those light-beer commercials, where they used to show a bunch of athletes hanging around in a bar. When we went in to sell the show, we had to give some prototype the network could latch onto. It hadn't been used very much on television, and we wanted a city with some charm-a city that would have that English-style sort of pub in it. **Les Charles: **We talked about putting this bar out in the desert somewhere, or in a small town, but once we were looking at a city, we immediately went to Boston. We actually thought of that while we were in a bar: "Why would anyone ever leave here?"īurrows: We also knew that we wanted to have a Tracy-Hepburn relationship. Glen Charles_: _Fawlty Towers _was a favorite at that time, and so we started talking about hotel stories, and we found that a lot of the action was happening in the hotel bar. Jimmy Burrows (co-creator/director): We wanted to call our company that: "A Jew and two Mormons." But unfortunately, it was taken. **Glen Charles: **We were a Jew and two Mormons, so we kind of banded together. I think we felt like contemporaries-like we were in the same college class, and suffered a lot of the same injuries and blows to our egos. **Les Charles ** (co-creator): We'd always gotten along extremely well. "With all due respect to Bunker Hill and Faneuil Hall, I think it continues to be the most popular attraction in Boston." "And they're still pouring in there," says Dukakis. The Bull Finch, the Boston bar shown at the beginning of each episode, racked up millions of dollars in tie-in and tourism money. The author was a fan and so was Prince and so were politicians Michael Dukakis and John Kerry, who both made cameos.
(The top network sitcom today, The Big Bang Theory, averages 18 million cable sitcoms get by on a few million.) It was that rare pop-culture phenomenon that seemed to appeal to everyone, from the guy who recognized himself in Norm, to one of the America's greatest novelists, Kurt Vonnegut. By 1993, at the end of its eleven-season run, it was earning a now unheard-of 26 million viewers per week. At a time when just a few million viewers can make a TV hit, it's hard to understate just how mega Cheers was.
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That's because of Glen and Les and Jimmy."Īfter an initial season of low ratings, Cheers would grow into a Nielsens-climbing, Emmy-gobbling cultural smash, thanks in large part to the show's central relationship, between Sam and his "aspiring poet" waitress, Diane Chambers, who drove each other crazy via a series of hook-ups, break-ups, and occasional slap-fests. , producers sit down with the network at the beginning of the year and talk about the arc of the show. "It was something bigger than a sitcom," says early Cheers writer-producer Sam Simon, who'd later help develop The Simpsons. But despite its elemental simplicity, the show sparked a quiet revolution in the way TV comedy was produced, with each half-hour episode playing into a soap-style arc of love, death, and bar-bets that would go on for eleven seasons. For the most part, people sat around a bar and talked. There was no callous snark, no deconstructive riffs, and only a handful of time-stamped pop-culture references. Created by director James Burrows and writer-producers Glen and Les Charles, Cheers would become the last blast of pre-irony prime-time. On September 30, 1982, NBC premiered a new sitcom called Cheers, a smartly written show about a bar owned by a retired relief pitcher named Sam Malone.
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