Cheers. A retrospective

When I was about 9 or 10 years old  I had a teacher from Boston. I remember he told us that every Friday he watched Cheers on Channel 4- It was his favorite TV program .I have remembered him, as I have reached Cheers during the Pandemic. With the pubs closed. With no holidays booked No football matches to cheer. My brother and I have with a few beers, and some snacks taken to watching classic TV. Such as ; Magnum PI, The A-Team. Air Wolf- Frasier and  Cheers.

 I remembered my old teacher, and I wondered how comforting Cheers would have been to him- An American living away from home. Having been an exile myself I know 

 I remember watching the final episode on live TV. It would have been my third or fourth year at High School.  I remembered the cast smoking cigars in the last scene.  Which is actually a very 1990s trope- The  late 1990s was the era of Cigar Afficando magazine 

What can I say about Cheers!  

Firstly Diane- Diane Chambers ( Shelly Long ) is a character out of time. I loathe using the word. But she is a millennial in a world of boomers, and X's/ Diane is over-educated- and under skilled. Rather like D-Fens in Falling Down  ( Diane gets flanderised as the series goes on - or perhaps gets a little too comfortable under Sam  Diane is shown to be a decent waitress in the earlier episodes. Which is why Sam hires her)  Diane also spends some time in a mental institution  Naturally Ms. Chambers is liberal and progressive. Cheers has a pro-Gay rights episode early on-  in which Diane takes the lead to educate and challenge the patrons of Cheers 

Diane is a well-observed horror even after she leaves. Diane's shade haunts the show. There is a nice gag in the middle of a later season When Norm asks Sam- how Diane is ? Sam flinches

Interestingly the fact that Sam and Diane are destructive is something that pop culture did not understand- Like the fact that Every step you take is not a romantic ballad  People my age  refer to themselves as Sam and Diane couples 

This is not to bash Kirsty Alley. Kirsty Alley is a fine comic actress. I did like her storyline with Robin  The show declines when Diane leaves. There is a tragic end to the storyline of one of the later seasons when Sam and Diane are going to have a baby together, and in real life, Alley miscarried late. But even that storyline in retrospect seems misjudged. Why not have Sam and Diane have a one-night stand? Or better after a hot weekend, Alley's character is flanderized too as the show goes on. It is a problem in long running series 

The rivalry between Sam and Melville's does not really go anywhere either. It fizzles out. 

The show is old and feels it.   Watching the pilot, Sam is dressed like someone from Saturday Night Fever, I am guessing pre-production began in 1980. In fact in the show's pomp the early eighties Sam dresses  more like a 2020 era young man- lots of rugby tops and lacrosse than later on when 1990s fashions begin to slip in- It was not 

As I said Cheers  feels old it  has deep roots. One of the first episodes is about a doughboy going to Cheers to see his war buddies, and him being the last man left alive.  . The cast is actually pretty ordinary-looking people- Compare them to the cast of Friends  Cliff and Norm are not handsome. Norm is fat and never gets thin. Carla is not a stereotypical beauty. One later episode has Fraiser Crane buying a hairpiece to date a much younger woman - curiously he looks the spit of Niles 

As I said it is old- People smoke at the bar. There are no mobile phones. There is a TV in the bar, but it is not big- Often the gang are watching reruns of comedies than satellite sports The gang goes to each other's houses to watch films on TV. We see Tip O'Neill and Robert Kennedy Jr in Cameo. Compare this to Friends or to Fraiser. A lot of the jokes made at Cliff's expense - Post Office would not be as biting today as we don't write letters anymore Ditto the expensive and extensive bar tab that Norm has, now credit cards are easier to get. Norm even has mail sent to the bar. Cliff delivers junk mail advertising - Strip clubs and adult video stores. Net porn has replaced all that

  There is a lot of Baseball talk 

Currently, channel 4 still shows repeats. I wonder when audiences will outgrow, and outlive the program- I mean do people still watch Mork and Mindy and Happy Days?

Cheers is  Bostonian. It still is a local landmark there The Sign used for location shots.  Friends is set in New York but you would never know. Beyond some Yellow Cab shots, and Rangers and Knicks references  Frasier in the early days is very much Bostonian. The gang goes to the Boston Celtic's stadium. People come in from doing the Freedom trail. Claven has a Boston accent.. 

It's a very Waspy Boston Sam Malone, aside there are few references to the Irish.  The Bar sings there will be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover. Frasier is revealed to be a Rhodes Scholar - A Python turns up. John Cleese- Now this is in part due to the fact that Cheers is supposed to be an old-fashioned English pub, rather than an American bar. In fact over the series, the bar seems to gentrify

 Cheers would have been better with fewer episodes. This is a problem for American TV generally a 22 episode series is a lot. There is a lot of revisiting the same places. There are two bar wars episodes in season 10.. There is as I mentioned the Celtics episode. There are obvious rip off's of its a Mad World, and Cheers visiting Johnny Carson. In fact the last episode of Cheers is not the finale but Cheerful goodbyes on Frasier. Where we meet most of the Cheers gang in a different context 

 I mentioned the celebrity cameos Interestingly there are a lot of politicians I mentioned Tip O Neill, and the Kennedys but also Mike Dukakis, and John Kerry Can you imagine Hillary on Friends? The show also had a bevy of Boston Celts, Red Sox, and Bruins- Can you imagine that on Scrubs?

https://www.looper.com/214197/cheers-cameos-you-completely-forgot-about/

The USSR falling, and the Biosphere project are name-checked too

You can see why Woody Harrelson, 60 years old this week- and I supposed it indicative of the passage of time since he first entered the show as Woody. Again the fact that a young man and the aged coach are pen pals does not raise a sneer. You can see easily how Harrelson and Kelsey Grammer made it big. Harrelson plays the hay seed so well. I have also fallen in love with Lillith in fact in the later series Cheers is as much a Fraiser and Lillth show. It's a pity, Bebe, never fully committed she is a regular briefly in a later season

Why rewatch it? Because when Cheers is good it's really good. Two of my favorite episodes feature Cliff before he is flanderised 

Fairy Tales can come true. Is the story of two shy people who are passed by life. Bonding and finding romance and even magic

Another is Cliff's rocky moment, where Cliff is faced with bullying man who objects to his presence 

The show is often farcical- Woody's wedding has the gang trying to hide and body and trashing a wedding cake. That episode had me reminded of Allo Allo.  Diane would be pleased that Cheers is quite theatrical. There is an episode where Fraiser and Robin have a monologue contest. We see Shakespeare performed in the bar. Cheers is often lit like a theatre set and not just the stage - in an episode we see Carla Dance

I put off watching the last episode. It still hurts- 

I miss that place. I am sorry it's closed