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Through the popularity of Cheers the idea of serialization in the sitcom became mainstream. Today nearly every sitcom is serialized.

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Cheers co-creator Les Charles regrets helping to make serialization common: "[W]e may have been partly responsible for what's going on now, where if you miss the first episode or two, you are lost. You have to wait until you can get the whole thing on DVD and catch up with it. If that blood is on our hands, I feel kind of badly about it. It can be very frustrating."

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On the 'Frasier' set, the challenges of an 11th season meld with those of moving on.

But last it has. "Most of the actors here are accustomed to the theater, where the longest job you have is a year or maybe two," observes Juilliard-trained Grammer. "So there's a kind of reminiscent excitement about going forward again into some unknown. It's like returning to our roots."

What may never be the same, though, is the financial security the show provided its key participants. As the show's star and an executive producer, Grammer signed a deal in 2001 that reportedly pays him $1.6 million per episode, which at the time was the most of anyone on TV and is now second only to the salary of "Everybody Loves Raymond" star Ray Romano. Pierce, too, reportedly makes upward of $1 million per episode for a show that will bring in hundreds of millions of dollars to Paramount in off-network syndication revenue.

Grammer, who began portraying Frasier on "Cheers" in 1984, readily admits to his delight in tying James Arness' record of 20 seasons as "Gunsmoke's" Marshal Matt Dillon. But he also acknowledges his sadness in seeing the show end. "I take mental notes and memorize certain things around me," Grammer says. "The way the lights shoot down on the cast when they're talking, the way the piano looks. It's been a big part of our lives."

SURROGATE FAMILY

The word "family" is a constant in conversation with people on "Frasier." Even before they knew the show was ending, for instance, the show's five stars took the entire crew, with spouses -- more than 200 people -- to Las Vegas as a Christmas present last year. "When I emigrated from England to the United States at 19, I never thought anything would be as wrenching as taking myself away from my brothers, sisters and parents," says actor Mahoney, who inhabits the role of father Martin. "But this will be like leaving my family all over again."

Gilpin met her husband, artist Christian Vincent, through "Frasier" executive producer Christopher Lloyd, had her rehearsal dinner at bridesmaid Leeves' beach house and was married at Grammer's house. Leeves met her Paramount executive husband, Marshall Coben, at a "Frasier" Christmas party. Now expecting her second child, Leeves quips: "Paramount has been good to me."

While writers made Daphne overweight, not pregnant, during her first pregnancy a few years ago, Leeves' second pregnancy has again given them several options for the final season's story line. Picking up where the 10th season ended, the first episode not only tackles Gilpin's Roz Doyle getting her old job back as Frasier's feisty producer at the radio station but features Daphne and Niles aggressively pursuing pregnancy.

"In the 11th season of the show, you're fighting against the fact you've already done 240 episodes," comments Bob Daily, who wrote the season's first episode. "So you're not only trying to find something 'Friends' or 'Raymond' or 'I Love Lucy' hasn't done, you're also trying to find something that you haven't done."

Guiding the last season are returning executive producers Christopher Lloyd and Joe Keenan, longtime "Frasier" writer-producers who had struck out on their own after the show's seventh season. Keenan, who just finished writing his 22nd script for the series, says that "the idea of being part of its final season was irresistible."

Lloyd, too, found the challenge alluring. He left after seven seasons because he was exhausted, he says, but "it was hard to pass up the opportunity to write the final chapter of a great story. The reality of television is you usually don't get to write the last chapter. The networks write it for you. We could find a nice way to send these people off into the sunset."

Lloyd hints that this season's story lines include Niles going through a midlife rebellious period with Martin and a love triangle between Frasier and Martin over Frasier's old baby-sitter. Frasier will go back into private practice for "more one on one with a lot of troubled but, we hope, colorful characters" -- including one patient with coulrophobia, which Lloyd defines as "a paralyzing fear of clowns."

While they haven't written the show's final episode, Grammer says, "I always had an idea for the last show. Chris and I have discussed it, and surprise, surprise, we have a similar vision. Of course we're not going to tell anybody."

Meanwhile, the cast, writers and others are already making plans for life after "Frasier." Keenan and Lloyd are contracted to develop a new show for Paramount, while novelist Keenan also plans to finish his third novel, put on a back burner while he's been writing "Frasier."

Mahoney compares their ensemble to "a little rep company" and the show's theater-minded cast all express interest in doing more stage work. Gilpin, for instance, is starring in "As Bees in Honey Drown" at the Pasadena Playhouse, while Leeves starred in "Cabaret" on Broadway last summer.

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On the 'Frasier' set, the challenges of an 11th season meld with those of moving on. But last it has. "Most of the actors here are accustomed to the theater, where the longest job you have is a year or maybe two," observes Juilliard-trained Grammer.

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So says Amy Poehler, and she isn't alone in thinking Cheers is pretty much perfect. On the thirtieth anniversary of the show's premiere, GQ sat down with just about everyone who made it and asked them about creating Sam and Diane, the birth of Norm!, Woody Harrelson's one-night stands, and many other secrets of what became TV's funniest guy show of all 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. Created by director James Burrows and writer-producers Glen and Les Charles, Cheers would become the last blast of pre-irony prime-time. There was no callous snark, no deconstructive riffs, and only a handful of time-stamped pop-culture references. For the most part, people sat around a bar and talked. 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. "It was something bigger than a sitcom," says early Cheers writer-producer Sam Simon, who'd later help develop The Simpsons. "It was a sweeping narrative. [Nowadays], producers sit down with the network at the beginning of the year and talk about the arc of the show. That's because of Glen and Les and Jimmy."

Even if you've never seen Cheers (and, by the way, all 275 episodes are now streaming on Netflix) you've seen its lineage. Amy Poehler and Mike Schur (creators of Parks Recreation), Bill Lawrence ( Scrubs), Dan Harmon ( Community), and Shawn Ryan ( The Shield) are all fans, if not downright scholars, of Cheers. "I hope and assume that every good comedy writer, no matter the age, has a moment where they discover how great Cheers is," says Poehler, who regularly watches Cheers episodes in her Parks Recreation trailer. "And I would encourage any young person getting into comedy to sit down and watch it."

Three decades after the show's premiere, nearly 40 _Cheers _cast members, writers, and producers talked to GQ about what might just be the greatest sitcom of all time (no offense, Seinfeld and The Simpsons). Here's the story of how three guys walked into a bar and created a classic.

_In the late '70s, budding TV director James Burrows and Glen and Les Charles, two English-major brothers from Nevada, were working on the sitcom Taxi. Toward the end of its run, their agent suggested the three stop working for others and create a show of their own. _

**Les Charles **(co-creator): We'd always gotten along extremely well. 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.

**Glen Charles: **We were a Jew and two Mormons, so we kind of banded together. We felt persecuted [laughs].

Burrows: We also knew that we wanted to have a Tracy-Hepburn relationship.

**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. 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. [Plus], it was a sports-crazy city. Everything seemed right about it.

When we went in to sell the show, we had to give some prototype the network could latch onto. [We mentioned] those light-beer commercials, where they used to show a bunch of athletes hanging around in a bar. That wasn't what we had in mind at all, but we thought that would get the thing rolling.

**Warren Littlefield **(vice president, NBC): The network was really hungry. CBS was in a renaissance of comedy, with , One Day at a Time, and The Jeffersons. ABC had Mork Mindy, Barney Miller, and Taxi. So the desire to work with Burrows-Charles was really to change NBC's identity, to say, "We want to be in the sophisticated-adult-comedy business."

Burrows: 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. I'd never seen anything like that on TV before-just guys sitting around, talking.
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. 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.
Glen Charles: We wanted to introduce the bar and the people in it through Diane's eyes. She was the audience's guide.

**Long: **Before the audition, I grabbed the dress I'd been planning to wear, only to realize that the waistband had been stretched to double it's normal size. But I didn't have an alternative and I was running late, so I just put a belt on and hoped it would be okay. When I met Ted, I realized too late that it was so blousy that I was giving him quite the view. I think it got us off to a really great start.

Danson: I was too terrified to notice she had breasts. I do remember that I was eating a sandwich.

**Burrows: **Usually, [actors] went into the casting office of the network, which was death. We literally did a stage presentation: We used the Bosom Buddies set, because they had a bar, put chairs in front, and had it catered. That was [our agent] Bob Broder's idea: Give them a little free wine and food, and they'll respond to it.

Glen Charles: Shelley was everybody's choice right away, but there was controversy about Ted. He was clearly not a football player, and not only physically. He didn't bring that attitude, that mentality. At the time, there was a [Red Sox] relief pitcher named Bill Lee, the "Spaceman." He was kind of nuts, as we found out a lot of relievers are. So [changing Sam's profession] gave us a very offbeat athlete-one with a lot of intelligence. He wasn't the sloth that scratches his armpits, which had been our original impulse. It made his treatment of Diane early on kind of intentional: He was trying to bug the hell out of her.

**Sam Simon **(writer-producer): In television, and especially in a situation comedy, you kind of play yourself, or at least the essence of yourself. And Ted isn't Sam Malone at all. He was a little bit insecure-not in a bad way, but not a jock. That was a challenge for him.

Long: I thought Diane was kind of tough in the pilot's script, so I made an effort in that first episode to soften my delivery and make her as feminine as possible. That came up for [a few] episodes, and then, I think, everybody agreed that Diane could still be smart without being tough.

Les Charles _(co-creator): _Shelley knew who her character was and had a much surer idea of herself than the rest of the cast. She was able to carry the show in the beginning while the others were finding their way. That's the way it worked: The actors got closer and closer to their characters. Or maybe their characters got closer to the people.

**Glen Charles: **I don't think George Wendt had that far to travel.

Rounding out the Cheers_ cast were Everyman barfly Norm Peterson (George Wendt), brutally honest waitress Carla Tortelli (Rhea Perlman), unreliable know-it-all mail carrier Cliff Clavin (John Ratzenberger), and child-like elder statesman and bartender Coach (Nicholas Colastanto). _
Burrows (left) makes comedy magic.
Les Charles: I worked at a bar after college, and we had a guy who came in every night. He wasn't named Norm, [but he] was always going to have just one beer, and then he'd say, "Maybe I'll just have one more." We had to help him out of the bar every night. His wife would call, and he'd always say, "Tell her I'm not here." I think that was the closest we had to a character based on one guy.

I can't say I based [Carla] on anybody I knew. She was so foulmouthed and mean, just said what was on her mind. So I guess Carla is somebody I always wished I could be at the right moment, the one who always has the perfect comeback.

**Wendt: **Nick Colasanto [Coach] was nearly 60 years old and had a long career as an actor and TV director. One day when we were workshopping with Jim about the characters' possible backstories, Nick [who was sober] said that when he had been drinking, every time one of the regulars walked into his favorite New York spot, everyone would yell out his name. So it stuck for Norm.

Ratzenberger: [Once] I said, "Nick, how do you do what you do?" He says, "Ratz, every day, when I pull in the parking lot and I get out of the car, I'm 12 years old." If you see Nick's episodes now, think of that: Whatever the line or situation is, he'd react like a 12-year-old. Perfect, but so simple.

Cheers premiered on September 30, 1982, at 9 p.m., _finished last in its time slot, and spent the first season in the ratings basement. NBC president Brandon Tartikoff championed the show, as did Emmy voters, who named it Outstanding Comedy Series in its first season. _

We didn't know that we were riding on thin ice the whole time. Maybe Ted and Shelley did, but they didn't act like it.

Long: When the ratings weren't going up, it drew my attention, but it didn't worry me. Today, I think it probably would, because you don't have Brandon Tartikoff rallying the troops and saying, "This is a great show. This show has to stay." [So] I didn't feel like the rug was going to be pulled out from under us. The rug seemed to be in pretty firm condition.

Les Charles: We started to get mail from people who would say things like, "If you break up [Sam and Diane], I'll never watch this show again." They were intensely interested in Sam and Diane's relationship, as if it were two real people.

**David Isaacs **(writer/producer): Maybe two weeks into the regular production, Jim came up to eat lunch with us and said, "Sam and Diane is our money. We have to go back to them, regardless of what the story is, [every] episode."

**Simon: **It happened by accident, and those three guys were smart enough to see it and make the show about them. If they had set out to make a show about a man and woman with amazing chemistry, it'd be like, "Well, good luck. If it doesn't work the first episode, you're screwed."

**Heide Perlman **(writer-producer; sister of Rhea): I don't think any sitcom had done that. It wasn't quite Tracy-Hepburn, because she was a tight-ass, and he was a hound.

**Les Charles: **I don't mean to get psychoanalytic here, but there is a similarity in the Sam and Diane relationship to the relationship of our parents. Our mother was prim and proper, a voracious reader who was always trying to improve her mind. Our father liked to hang out at the bar and watch sports. I don't think he ever read a book.

Burrows: Half the people wanted to go to bed with Diane, and half the people wanted to kill her, including Sam.

Danson: You could identify with Sam and Diane on so many levels. Women's libbers loved to hate Sam, but he was so transparently, painfully who he was that you could still laugh at him, even if you were a feminist. People who were bamboozled by women totally associated with Sam, [as did] people who thought they were God's gift to women. It brought different crowds in.

**Long: **Our audience was so tuned in to every move, because the flirting between Sam and Diane during the first season was totally outrageous. There was talk about "Would it be right to advance the relationship, or could that condemn the relationship?" I put my two cents in-big surprise-and said, "In a real relationship, you take two steps forward, one step back. So just because we take two steps forward and get all the benefit from that doesn't mean we can't go back or to the side." Ultimately, that's what worked.

**Heide Perlman: **Some of the tension went out of it when they were together. It's harder to write two people happy and in love than two people fighting and driving each other crazy. Moonlighting had the same problem: Everyone wants the two characters to be together, but then once they are, it's not that much fun.

**Ken Levine _(writer/producer): _**The final two episodes of the first season were shot in one night and build to that scene where Sam and Diane are fighting-"Are you as turned on as I am?" "More"-and they kiss. The audience went absolutely crazy nuts. I turned to David Isaacs and said, "We've peaked. There's nothing we can do with these two that is going to evoke that much of a reaction."

Burrows: If Sam couldn't bed a woman in a year, then he was not the cocksman we wanted him to be. So he had to do that.

Burrows: When the summer reruns happened, people who had already seen Simon Simon and Magnum, P.I. started to watch our show. We had a big party in our office, because we got to ninth place.

Danson: I remember this one news clip of a small station somewhere. They decided to put something else in _Cheers'_s lot, and there were demonstrations outside the station. It was like, "Oh. That's pretty cool." And then the show just kind of exploded.

From its first season, Cheers' writing staff was one of the most decorated-and envied-creative teams in television. Over the years, its line-up included vets like David Lloyd (The Mary Tyler Moore Show) and Jerry Belson (The Dick Van Dyke Show), and upstarts like David Angell, Peter Casey, and David Lee, who'd later go on to create Frasier_. _
Wendt, Les, Glen, and Danson.
Isaacs: We worked in Glen's office, which was set up like a sitting room. There was a desk that only Glen sat behind, and Les sat in a chair by the window, and he always had one of those plastic coffee stirrers that he chewed on.

**Simon: **There could be chaos going on, people pitching jokes, and Les would be picking what he wanted and whispering it into the writers' assistant's ear. And at the end of the night, the script was put together. I learned how to run a room by watching him.

**Phoef Sutton **(writer-producer): It was a very tough room. If you pitched bad stuff, they'd lacerate you. There were long silences. I didn't speak for the first three months on staff, because I was so in awe of everybody.

**Bill Steinkellner **(writer-ecutive producer): The goal was excellence. And, if possible, to go home with the lights still off.

Heide Perlman: I don't remember what script it was, but at the Monday table read, the [opening] teaser didn't work. We went back and had to think of a new teaser, and [after] four hours, five hours, we weren't landing on anything. People were saying, "Maybe we should come back to it." And it was probably Glen who said, "What are we, cowards?" You had to do it, no matter how long it took.

And when we got to Cheers, everybody could talk to everybody. Now, granted, if you were smart you had a sense of where you were on the totem pole, you watched your comments and obviously deferred to the bosses. But if I saw something that Shelley had done that I thought was particularly good, or if a writer had a suggestion for a way she might be able to do it better, you got to tell her that. The only rule was you had to do it so everybody could hear; there were no private conversations. It had to be open with everybody. It really fostered this feeling that we were all in it together.

Les Charles: Back in the old days, there was a rule that every TV episode had to be complete in itself, so you could tune into a television show for the first time and be able to enjoy that show and know where you were. And we started doing continuing stories and cliffhangers and evolving relationships and so on, and we may have been partly responsible for what's going on now, where if you miss the first episode or two, you are lost. You have to wait until you can get the whole thing on DVD and catch up with it. If that blood is on our hands, I feel kind of badly about it. It can be very frustrating.

**Steinkellner: **We thought, "Let's get [Vonnegut] to write an episode!" Then the whole discussion came up: "But what if it sucks? We can't re-write it!"

Burrows: Nick was sick when he was cast.

Wendt: He'd been getting kind of thin. [Earlier in the season], they called us all into Glen and Les' office, and they told us his heart muscle was sort of dying, but they said he had been cleared to come back to work. They said, "Well, it could mean six weeks, could mean six years." So we were all like, "Oh. Well, that's a drag, but it seems like he's ready to come back to work." We were [hoping for] six years. It turned out it was six weeks.

**Danson: **When Nick had heart disease, he was getting less and less oxygen. There wasn't a surface on that set that didn't have his lines written down. There was one episode where a friend of Coach dies, and he says, "It's as if he's still with us now." Nick had written the line on the wood slats by the stairs the actors would use to enter the studio. Nicky dies, and the next year, we're all devastated, and the first night we come down the stairs, right there was his line: "It's as if he were with us now." And so every episode, we'd go by it and pat it as we'd come down to be introduced to the audience.

_Sam and Diane's will-they-won't-they relationship

spawned a gazillion sitcom copycats._

And then, one year, they repainted the sets and they painted over the line. People almost quit. Seriously. They were so emotionally infuriated that that had been taken away from them.

_The producers had to quickly come up with a replacement character: Woody Boyd, an Indiana farm boy who'd just moved to the big city. _

Harrelson: At the audition, I didn't know I was going into a room with [all the producers], so I was blowing my nose when I walked in. The room erupted in laughter, and somebody said, "This is Woody." And of course, the part was named Woody. So that put me in a good position.

Casey_: ___Harrelson comes in to read looking like he just came off a basketball court. He had on athletic shorts and unlaced high-tops, and I'm going, "This is so not the character." And then he read, and he brought this beautiful innocence to the whole thing, and when [his character] heard the news that Coach had died, he cried a little. No actor had done that.

Harrelson: I was going with the flow, being in the moment. Most of all, I was unconcerned, because I knew I was going back to do Broadway, and that was my dream. That's the best way to audition for anything: When your back-up plan is your dream, you know?

**Burrows: **In the first episode, [Woody Boyd] leaps over the bar, and that pissed Teddy off: "This young whippersnapper..." Teddy started going to the gym.

**Danson: **I don't know if I went to the gym, [but] Woody is 24, and at that point I was like 37, which is when you realize you're no longer 24. So in walked Woody, who was instantly great, but offstage, it was [all] testosterone. There was a half-court [on the lot], and the guys used to play basketball right before the show. We took him out to give him a lesson, and he kicked our asses. All right, we'll arm-wrestle. I still have, like, tendinitis in my elbow. He was just wiping the floor with me. John, who has good, strong legs, leg-wrestled him. Woody cleaned everybody's clock in everything. Then we got less physical and went to chess, and he whipped our asses with chess.

I didn't have a brother, so Woody became my brother. And brothers can be incredibly competitive and knock the shit out of each other, but they know they won't cross a line. I loved him.

**Harrelson: ** I was very excited by this newfound ability to hang out with gals who probably wouldn't have hung out with me before. I became a party animal. You couldn't do what I did now because of all the tweeting and Facebooking. All the shit I did back then, I'd be hung from the rafters.

**Wendt: ** Woody brought this impishness. He brought it out in Ted, especially.

**Danson: **I'll tell you about the worst day of my life. Shelley and Rhea were carrying that week's episode, and the guys were just, "Let's play hooky." We'd never done anything wrong before. John had a boat, so we met at Marina del Rey at 8 a.m. We all called in sick, and Jimmy caught on and was so pissed. Woody and I were already stoned, and Woody said, "You want to try some mushrooms?" I'd never had them, so I'm handed this bag and I took a fistful. On our way to Catalina, we hit the tail end of a hurricane, and even people who were sober were getting sick. Woody and I thought we were going to die for three hours. I sat next to George, and every sixty seconds or so he'd poke me and go, "Breathe." [gasp] And I'd come back to life.

**Harrelson: ** I was a little worried about him. It looked like his face was melting. I think I may have been freaking a little myself, but I had to be cool about it.

**Wendt: ** We got into serious trouble for that. I think we thought Jimmy and Les and Glen would have more of a sense of humor about it. We did it because Ted was doing it. He's sort of a reluctant leader. He didn't try to flex his influence. He's just eminently followable.

**Danson: **My job playing Sam Malone was to let the audience in, to love my bar full of people. And that informed my life. I mean, we're so different [in the cast], some of us. Miles apart. [But] when I see anyone from those days, I tap into that instant love for them. I don't care what they do, what they say, how different we are: I love them, because it was eight hours a day, eleven years, making each other giggle and laugh and being a team. There was no weak link.

_In the third-season premiere in September 1984, a distraught Diane-who'd been driven to a mental institution-returned to the bar with cocky, uptight psychiatrist Frasier Crane. Fans were wary at first, but in future seasons, he and his equally repressed wife, Dr. Lilith Sternin (who would arrive two years later as a series regular) would become hugely popular. _

**Burrows: **We'd get Sam and Diane into some predicament, and then over the summer, when the boys would start writing, we thought, "How do we get them back together?" That's how Frasier evolved.

Les Charles: We'd never had a real threat to Sam and Diane's relationship. I think our inspiration [for Frasier] was the role Ralph Bellamy used to play in Cary Grant movies-the guy the lady falls in love with but it isn't real. You just know he doesn't have the sexual dynamism Grant does.

**Kelsey Grammer **(Dr. Frasier Crane): The first thing I thought [when I read the script] was that Frasier was an intellectual at some points but also an Everyman-flawed and very insecure. The other thing I thought was that when he decided to love, he was completely-what is it Othello says?-"perpled in the extreme." What made him endearing in the end was that his love for Diane was without question.

[But] when I auditioned for the twenty people that were in the room, I didn't get a single laugh. I thought, "Holy shit. I'm done. I blew this completely." I put the script down, thanked everybody, and said, "I'm going to go and see if I can get some laughs out on the street." But then they sent me a bottle of champagne and said, "Welcome to Cheers."
Rebecca was more like a (hot) sister to Sam.
Long: There were two actors [they liked], and Ted and I read with them, and it was so obvious that it was Kelsey

Glen Charles: Kelsey told me one time [that] after his first season, he was in a bar, and this guy walks up and says, "Are you that pin dick that plays Frasier?" He was actually upset that Frasier was coming between Sam and Diane.

**Les Charles: **That was a really common reaction to Kelsey. We'd get horrible fan mail, or anti-fan mail, about Kelsey breaking up Sam and Diane or coming between them.

Grammer: I was not really privy to it, and I'm glad they kept it from me.

Staley_: ___My biggest shock, when I first showed up at the show, was the disconnect between Frasier and Kelsey. Because Kelsey was just this lovely, friendly beach guy who would [say], "Yeah, I'm in Hermosa this weekend. Come on down, hang out with Kels."

Jay Thomas (who played Carla's husband, Eddie LeBec): I would see Kelsey sometimes at 5 o'clock in the morning with no shoes on, pushing a sports car down the street with a half [passed-out] woman in the passenger seat. I'm pulling in to get gas, and I go, "Hey Kelsey! What are you doing?" And he goes, "Well hey, how are you?"

**Long: **In the third year, right before we started the season, I told them I was pregnant. And they were saying, "Oh, well, we could do this, and we could do that, and Frasier could be the father." And I said, "No, I don't think that's right. You said Hepburn and Tracy to us when we started, and I think this should be Tracy's baby." I guess Kelsey had been told that, and he was really upset about it. I talked to him on the phone once and I said, "You know, this was not about you, the actor; this was about Sam and Diane."

**Long: **Oh, that's so wrong. He's a brilliant talent, and he was so wonderfully funny on the show. I even watched Frasier, you know? I have no idea how he got that idea other than me speaking up one time and saying, "No, I really don't think it should be Frasier's baby."

It's just a crime that people don't take the time and make the effort to have a conversation if it's bothering them that much. I wish he had said something, but he never did. You know, it's too bad.

**Grammer: **Who knows? Maybe it _was _all my problem! I don't know. Maybe none of that was really true. But, early on, I did have a feeling that she would've been happier if I hadn't been on the show. Once Frasier was no longer a threat to what I think she felt was her arc for Ted, it was great. [Shelley and I] made up sometime after.

Bill Steinkellner: [Cheri and I] wrote the first script that Lilith was in. . She was in a little bit of the first scene, and then she left. The next year came, they said, "Let's get a girlfriend for Frasier."

Bebe Neuwirth (Lilith Sternin): In 1985, I was doing a pre-Broadway run of Sweet Charity [that] started in LA and had four months off before opening on Broadway. So I stayed and tried to rustle up whatever work I could while I was waiting. The first job was on Simon Simon, and the second was Cheers. I don't know that I had seen it. But my parents, who are very smart, very sophisticated, they loved Cheers.

In New York, in musicals, I was playing parts that would never have been described the way Lilith was in the breakdown. [I thought], "What do you mean, 'not so good-looking?'" [laughs] She was kind of drab-hair straight back in a bun, uptight, no sense of humor. The musical stuff I'd go up for was always funny, sexy, tough-as-nails, heart-of-gold characters. So when I first auditioned for Lilith, I really struggled. Then her voice occurred to me in my head, and I started reading it out loud to myself, and it made me laugh. That was her.

**Levine: **Jay did a morning radio show, and somebody said [on the air], "It must be great being on Cheers," and Jay said something like, "Yeah, it's not so great," and he mentioned having to kiss Rhea Perlman.

Thomas: [Listeners] would go, "What's it like to kiss Carla?" Not Rhea-they were talking about Carla. And my joke what that I got combat's pay to kiss her.

**Levine: **Rhea came up to my office and she was furious-I'd never seen her like this. She said, "I want him off the show."

Rhea Perlman: That's not true. I loved Jay Thomas as Eddie LeBec. But there was a point where they [thought] maybe we would live together, and I didn't like the idea of Carla being with somebody because that would make you feel like [you're] not part of the people in the bar.

Thomas: Look, I made jokes about kissing Murphy Brown [too]. But if that's what cost me my job, my wife will probably say, "Hey asshole, I told you so." [Eddie exits in "Death Takes a Holidy on Ice," when he's run over by a Zamboni.]
Grammer's partying was getting out of control; there were a couple of arrests-one of which ended with Grammer pleading no contest to cocaine possesion-in 1988 and 1990. An unsuccessful on-set intervention was held by the show's producers and cast.
Glen Charles: Kelsey was going through a divorce and child-custody issues. He had some problems.

**Dan O'Shannon **_(writer/producer; ecutive producer on Modern Family): _He would ooze into the studio, his life all out of sorts. Jimmy would say "Action," and he would snap into Frasier and expound in this very erudite dialogue and be pitch-perfect. And Jimmy would yell "Cut!" and he would ooze back into Kelsey-glazed-over eyes, half asleep, going through whatever he was going through. It was the most amazing transformation I'd ever seen.

**Bebe Neuwirth **(Dr. Lilith Sternin): I really loved Kelsey. It wasn't a romantic love, but there was something about him. It's very difficult to see someone you care about having a hard time. Some days were better than others. One time they had to shut down for the day. I can only wing it after I know what I'm doing, and there was a complicated scene with lots of props, and during rehearsal nothing was happening. I thought, Jesus, you have to be like this today?

**Levine: **The only time I felt affected [by his behavior] was when an episode we wrote where Kelsey was really erratic all week, and it was a really tough filming night, because he didn't remember his lines. We cobbled a performance [from the footage], but it was difficult.

**Lee: **The [effects of the] first intervention lasted for a while, but then it didn't take. And in retrospect, the guy on the second intervention [during the spin-off series Frasier] said, "The problem with the first one was that Kelsey walked into the room [and] the interventionist said, 'These are your friends. I think you need to go off to get some help.' and Kelsey just said, 'Okay.'" No one in the room got to air their grievances or let him know how serious it was, or be specific about what problems they were experiencing in their relationships with him.

Grammer: I went and did some things [rehab], and then of course my life didn't change that much [for a while], but I never missed work. One time I went out for a few cocktails before we shot, and my words were slurred a bit. I feel forever apologetic about that.

_In the summer of 1986, Cheers began work on a fifth season, without knowing if Long would renew her contract. _

**Long: **I'd gotten into a routine of going into my dressing room and meditating at lunch. I needed to rest, just let go of all of it. Because I really felt sometimes like I was physically pulling the plot, and it was heavy. I'm sure it didn't look great that I was going into my dressing room at lunch. I wish I could've hung out with the cast and got lunch. But it's not restful for me to be in a public dining room and eat. It's just not. And I was exhausted by the end of the morning because I tried to deliver as much of a performance as I could for each run-through.

**Lofaro: **The fifth season was when things started to get a bit rough, in terms of managing the show. Shelley believed that she was the new Lucille Ball, and she would spend hours after the run-through talking with the writers about her character and the story, just talking it to death. They would indulge her, but they indulged her to a point where they couldn't stand it anymore.

Glen Charles: Shelley liked to discuss things. It was never a tantrum. But it did take a lot of talking, and I think the biggest problem was with the rest of the cast, because we'd have a reading at the table, and immediately she'd want to talk about it. The normal procedure was for Jimmy to take the cast down and start blocking it, so we could see it on its feet. So that indulgence on our part, I think, created a schism between Shelley and the rest of the cast.

Rhea Perlman: It's not really something I can talk about, to tell you the truth. I can't go there. I don't think it's worth it, at this point in life.

Long: There was scuttlebutt about me talking too much and being passionate about Diane. But I thought, "That's my job. That's what I'm supposed to do.... Don't tell me not to get involved in the discussion."

**Danson: **Shelley's process would have infuriated you if it had been mean or if it hadn't been purposeful. But it was purposeful-it was her way of being Diane-and there's not a mean bone in Shelley's body. I had trouble hanging around her until we stood onstage together, and then I was in heaven.
On December 16, 1986, Long announced she was leaving the show. The show was so popular and the announcement so shocking that it became national news.
**Les Charles: **Diane was not a lovable character, and I think people transposed that onto Shelley and blamed her for breaking up a show they really loved.

But most people tended to understand, because I had a two-year-old baby, and I wanted to spend more time with my family, which was the other reason I left the show. And I did spend more time with my family. It was a good decision. It was really good.

**Levine: **There was a lot of concern that Shelley leaving would cause the show's downfall, so everyone's livelihood was at stake. It's funny, there were actors who said that she drove them nuts, yet they were also mad that she was leaving. It's like the restaurant where the food is so bad and the portions are so small.

Lee: Our jaws dropped when we found out she was leaving. From a writing standpoint, you would look at [Sam and Diane's] scenes and go, "That's the glue that's holding everything together."

**Danson: **I was scared. Could I be any good? Would people want to watch one-half of the relationship? She put _Cheers _on the map. Was she the entire show?

**Sutton: **I believe we wrote two endings to her finale, and there were dummy scripts handed out that had the ending where they stayed together. It was probably the first time a show did what they now on shows like_ Lost_, where they try to keep it secret, because we wanted to surprise people. [And] it was a possibility that maybe, at the last minute, Shelley would decide to stay.

**Casey: ** We shot an ending where they got married. Then we released the audience, and shot the actual ending of her leaving. So anybody who was at the last show was probably out there saying, "Hey, they got married!"
SAM MALONE (as Diane leaves the bar) Hey...have a good life. DIANE CHAMBERS (turning around): "Have a good life?" Well, that's something you say when something's over. Sam, I'm going away for six months. That's all. So no more of this "Have a good life" stuff. SAM: You never know. You could die. I could die. The world could end. One of us could bump our heads and wander the streets for the rest of our life with amnesia. Or maybe one of us will decide they want something else. DIANE: None of those things will happen. I'll be back here. I will. I'll see you in six months. Okay? SAM (to himself): Have a good life.
**Les Charles: **I remember one critic saying, when Shelley walked out that door, "There goes Cheers." And for all we knew, they might have been right. But we said to ourselves, "We're not going to do another romance. We're going to find something different."
The writers came up with Sam selling Cheers to a megaconglomerate, and introduced meltdown-prone striver Rebecca Howe, who would briefly manage the bar. Any concern about ratings dropping after Long left soon dissolved: They got even bigger.
**Greenberg: **We wanted to keep [her auditions] secret, because we didn't want to shove it in Shelley's face; it was only November, and she was going to be there until March. So we had all these secret meetings. My own assistants didn't even know it was happening. We had her come to the studio on a Saturday, when no one was on the Cheers set, and she did two scenes, one with Ted, and one with Rhea.

Jimmy, Les and Glen loved her, but the network, who gets final word on these things, did not. They didn't see the audition, and didn't consider Kirstie a comic actress. So we had to go through the process of looking at every other actress, [like] Sharon Stone, Kim Cattrall, Marg Helgenberger. And after this long process, NBC finally said, "Well, if they are that passionate about her, how can we deny [them]?"

**Glen Charles: **We wanted her to be the Joan Collins [character], the gorgeous woman who's the boss, and everybody thinks of ways to circumvent her and foul her up.

**Burrows: **When they wrote the character, Rebecca was a real bitch. Then we had the first run-through, and it was not funny. It wasn't funny until Rebecca had to go to her office, and [Kirstie] couldn't get into the door. She kept turning it and it wouldn't turn, and she got frustrated, and I remember us going, "Oh, my God, this is what this character is: a woman of the '80s, during the feminist movement, who thinks she has control of everything, and she can't open a freaking door."

Alley: They started writing Rebecca more like I am-a little klutzy and self-deprecating. That's why it worked; I fit in with the rest of the losers.

**Brian Ellis **(assistant director) Kirstie showed up for the first script reading dressed as Shelley, with a blonde wig on. And it was so funny, that kind of [attitude]: "Okay, she can make fun of herself. This is going to be interesting to see." She fit right in.

Ratzenberger: We gave Kirstie a shotgun. I own shotguns, so it's not foreign to me. George came up with the note on a card: "You're going to have to shoot your way out of here." So, basically saying welcome.

Alley: It was a boys' club, and I do well in boys' clubs. Woody and I instantly hit it off. I was married, but he would show up at my house sometimes and stay over. One night he brought this girl to bang, and then in the middle of the night he decided he didn't want to, so he was knocking on my bedroom door: "Kirs? Kirs? Can you talk to me a minute? I'm just not into this chick." I said, "Woody, you have to take responsibility. I can't coach you into sleeping with her, but you need to go back there, dude." I think she was in the bedroom crying while we were chatting about this.

I had the halfway house. I can't tell you how many nights I spent around my kitchen table, soothing broken hearts.

**Neuwirth: **Kirstie saved me, in a way. [At the time], I had a terrible marriage, and I stayed at her house. She was wonderful-just a kind, big-hearted, filthy girl. Somehow she could be vulgar without being vulgar.

**Alley: **Upstairs, everyone had dressing rooms, and there were bathrooms where you'd take showers before the show. So the big game became getting the door open, so that you could take pictures of nude people. I have the greatest picture of Ted. That was a big caper: There was one person [opening] the door with a butter knife and another person kicking the door in so I could get a photo. He's decapitated, but totally nude. And he's really well-endowed.
Though Sam pursued Rebecca with typical zeal, she preferred wealthy schemers like Robin Colcord, a Trump-like millionaire played by British actor Roger Rees. A Tony-winner, Rees was one of many high-profile guest stars to visit the bar, which became a temporary home to a motley mix of politicians, athletes, and Broadway performers.
Roger Rees (Robin Colcord): I was in a play in the West End of London called _Hapgood, _by Tom Stoppard. I played a Russian particle physicist. So I came over to do the play [in L.A.] and I imagined I would be going straight back to Britain afterwards.

I believe the people from Cheers saw that production, and they [asked if I'd] like to come in and see them. It was probably the hottest day of my life-but being from Britain, I put my suit on with my tie, drove down Melrose to Paramount Studios, and was taken to the writers' room. There were about twenty writers in there, and they were all dressed for the beach. Some were just in shorts. The scales dropped from my eyes: "Oh, I see. This is what goes on in America." I'm very formal, but I think they thought, "Oh, we got the right person."

They said, "Do you like Cheers?" I'd never really seen it. All I knew was that it was a dark brown program on late at night. But I said, "It is indisputably my most favorite program I've ever seen."

**Cheri Steinkellner: **Somebody would let us know they were a fan, and we'd say, "Let's put him on."

**Glen Charles: **That was really a treat. But she backed out.

**Les Charles: **She said everybody tuning in would expect to see Lucy, and for her to play something so completely different-even a little bit different-would be disappointing to her fans.

**Burrows: **Our first guest star of any notability was [Speaker of the House] Tip O'Neill, followed by Dick Cavett, Those were our major cameos. Gary Hart, Wade Boggs...

****Levine: ****Here's what happened with Wade Boggs : At the end of the [sixth season], NBC asked for another episode, and we needed to slam it together. We thought it would be kind of fun to have a Boston athlete come into the bar, and thought, "Who's the biggest Boston athlete we can get?" And we said, "Wade Boggs." This was March, he was in spring training, but our casting director put in a call to try. If he turns us down, we go on our way. [Boggs] calls back, like, an hour later, and says he got permission from the manager to miss a couple of days.

So he does it, and about a year later, there's a big magazine article about his mistress, who lived out in Anaheim. She talks about how he called her and said, "Good news: I got a free trip to L.A., I'm going to do this Cheers show. And they're going to pay me." So that's why he did it. Then he said, apparently, "Can I borrow a pair of your panties?" and she said, "Why?" And he said, "I promised the guys on the team I could bring back Kirstie Alley's panties."

**Alley: **One time, I brought Prince to the set. He's a friend of mine, and he asked to come. There were VIP rooms behind the audience, where a lot of the ecs would sit, so I had Prince sitting up there. Everyone wanted to meet him, but he's a little shy. I think Woody went in and shook hands with him, and came down and said, "He isn't even talking to me!" But Jackie Swanson-she had a relationship with Prince, too.

**Swanson: **I've known Prince for many years-I worked on the "Raspberry Beret" video-and Kirstie and I used to fight about him. He once sent a card [saying] he had penned a song about me, called "Palomino Pleasure Ride." I remember bringing this card to work one time and showing Kirstie and saying: "See? Now who's the better friend?" It was so ridiculous. But Prince thought the writing on _Cheers _was smart. And he loved Kelly's headbands.

Harrelson: The thing I remember most was, after taping, we'd all head upstairs, and me, Kelsey, Teddy and George would play foosball. We got into tournaments. It was mind-blowing how aggressive and loud it was-it was foosball, you know? But God, it was fun.

**Grammer: **That all ended as soon as Frasier began. No one from that crowd was really interested. I finally moved the table out to my house, and it ended up being sold with the house. So it's now in the hands of somebody who may not know its intrinsic value.

By the time Cheers_ headed into the '90s, the challenge for everyone was how do you keep the show fresh?_

Danson: The first few years, the adrenaline pump is: "Can I do this? Will I be good? Will they love us? Did we rehearse enough?" You know, from about eight years on, that adrenaline pump is gone, but you need adrenaline to perform or you're fucked. So the way people at _Cheers _got pumped was to rehearse less and less, to be less certain.

As the years went on, it got crazier and crazier: "Where's Woody?" "Oh, he called this morning; he's in Berlin because the Wall's coming down." Well, that would piss off John, who would then fly to Seattle to harvest his apples-literally.

Harrelson: I did have a problem with tardiness. Me and John Ratznenberger butted heads a few times, and I think me and Bebe Neuwirth [clashed] a couple of times.

**Wendt: **People used to admire the loosey-goosey quality we brought to it. We used to chuckle to ourselves and say, "That's because we just learned it five minutes ago."

Sutton: Around year seven or eight, you'd kill yourself when you realized Norm had to enter and you had to come up with a new beer joke.

Casey: By the tenth season, we knew Sam had to change, to become more self-aware. It's one thing for a 25-year-old guy to talk about all his conquests; you just sort of go, "Oh, he's a young stud sowing his oats." It's another thing for a 40-year-old to be doing that. That becomes pathetic.
In 1992, Danson-who was on the brink of divorce thanks to a public affair with Whoopi Goldberg-solved the problem of Sam's lack of evolution by announcing that he was leaving the show.
Wendt: At the end of season whatever, seven, eight, nine, 10, everyone would go, "What's the deal. How do we all feel about this?" Pretty much everyone said, "I'll do it if you do it." It was always on Ted, ultimately.

I don't think it was an emotionally mature decision. I brought the house down around my ears, lit it on fire, and then went "I have to go."

Glen Charles: We had a very long meeting with him, and we knew it was coming. And we totally understood. Eleven years is a long time for a television series, even with a couple of major cast changes, to rejuvenate it, and I think we were feeling what he was feeling: That we'd pretty much gotten everything out of this concept that we could.

Swanson: Jimmy Burrows called me at home and said, "Have you heard?" I could hear the emotion in his voice. It was really bittersweet.

Harrelson: After it became clear Teddy wasn't going to do the show anymore, [a network ec] took me to dinner and said, "We can keep the show going, and you'll be the guy who owns the bar." We hadn't even had our appetizers yet! I said, "Ted Danson's the star, and I can promise people will not want to see it without him." I didn't want to do it without him. Dinner was awkward after that.

_On May 20th, 1993, a staggering 40 million people watched the Cheers finale,_ in which Sam ditches the bar and takes off with Diane-only to return alone, having realized they can never be together. The series ends with Sam and the gang hanging out in the bar before he closes up for the night.

Long: I was disappointed that Sam and Diane didn't get together in the very last episode. I had no input whatsoever. I expressed my opinion, but just in passing. It didn't change.

Les Charles: I don't think we ever entertained that idea of Sam and Diane going off together. It seemed like [we'd be] going backwards a little. I'm not sure if that big of a portion of our audience would have been happy with it, because there were people who loved Shelley, but a lot of people liked Rebecca better, or thought Diane was bad for Sam, and so on.

Danson: At the time, my 6-year-old kept thinking my character's name was "Sam Alone," which is kind of brilliant. The funny came out of Sam's sad core: the alcoholic, the sex addict, the person who thinks he's God's gift.

_Sam: I still keep thinking, though...I want some kind of change in my life. _
Woody: You know something? I hate change. I mean, you know-every day, you wake up, and something's changed. Everything's just changing so fast. I like things to stay the way there are, you know? I like things you can count on. Sam: You know, you just gave me something to think about, Woody. Woody: Oh, I'm sorry, Sam. I hate when it someone does that to me.
**Shawn Ryan: **I don't get a sense that Cheers is revered the way it should be by [younger viewers]. Seinfeld and_Friends_ and The Simpsons are probably that generation's touchstones. In my mind, it's a show that should always, always, always be in the pantheon. But can it ever mean to future generations what it meant to us? When something changes TV, it's hard to look back on it, decades later, and appreciate that change.

**Casey: **David [Isaacs] teaches a writing class down at USC, and I speak at his class each semester. For a lot of kids,_ Cheers_ isn't even on their radar.

Staley: I have a son who's almost 19, and I don't think he's ever seen an episode. He asked me recently if it was in black and white. It was like, "Jesus Christ."

Ackerman: When you think of all the great screwball comedies like Capra and Preston Sturges-Jimmy and the Charles brothers did the television version of it. There's nothing like it since. I'd love to have that style come back.

Alley: I didn't care about the show ending at first, because I was doing movies. But when [fall] rolled around, it was "What the fuck is this?" I had nowhere to go. I think it would be great to have a reunion with everybody now, as long as it's just another stupid day at the bar: Rebecca's divorced, Sam's still not married. They're all in the exact same situation.

Glen Charles: We never even considered doing any kind of reunion show. Sam alone at the bar was the last image we wanted. That's where the show started and where it ended. It let people think that there's still a bar in Boston where you can walk in and see this aging baseball player.

Danson: I let my [past] life in peripherally, because I'm interested in what's over there; I want to keep going forward. But there's not anything I do in my life that doesn't go back to Cheers. I get to walk around and have people say "Hey" and smile and laugh. I get bathed in this kind of after- Cheers glow as a direct result of Jimmy, Les, and Glen. I got to play Sam Malone. How cool is that?

MORE STORIES LIKE THIS ONE

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So says Amy Poehler, and she isn't alone in thinking _Cheers_ is pretty much perfect.

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One of the biggest media stories this fall is the end of the legendary dramatic series Breaking Bad. But legends never die, or at least in the world of television. They merely get spun off.

A scant two weeks before the end of Breaking Bad AMC announced the continuation of the series, sort of, with the prequel Better Call Saul, centered on Breaking Bad's consigliore and resident competent scumbag lawyer Saul Goodman. While the spin-off, as a concept, has a spotty track record (friends spin-off Joey, anyone?) the spin-off isn't necessarily doomed to failure or disappointing sequel like diminishing returns, and in some cases can grow even more prosperous than its parent show.

Better Call Saul is going to have a hard time getting out of the shadow of its enormously successful forebearer, but as history shows, it's not an entirely ludicrous proposition.

Happy Days

The gold standard for what a spin-off can be, as few people seem to know this show was a spin-off at all. It was, as the story of Richie Cunningham, Fonzie and the rest of their clean-cut 50s gang was descended from the show Love, American Style.

The multi-cam (meaning, filmed in front of a live studio audience) ran for an astounding 254 episodes, and thrity years after its conclusion still continues to worm its way into both the public consciousness and public vernacular. The phrase "jump the shark," which means when a series has ceased to be any good, is a direct reference to a late-period episode of Happy Days where the water-skiing Fonz literally jumped over a shark.

Frasier

Of all the insanely likable characters to come out of the Cheers franchise - affable playboy Sam Malone, cheery functional alcoholic Norm, barroom know-it-all Cliff Clavin - prickly psychiatrist Frasier Crane seemed one of the least likely to get his own show. However, when Cheers ended its fantastically profitable run and it came time to take another crack at a spin-off (Carla spin-off The Tortellis had already tanked), Kelsey Grammer's defining character Frasier was the one to take center stage.

Defying nearly every sitcom stereotype for its leads, Frasier was haughty, disdainful, and exceedingly uptight. While he was tempered by his down-to-earth father, tThe show further defied general odd-couple expectations by sticking Frasier with someone even more haughty and uptight, his impossibly foppish brother Niles.

But despite the unusual premise of the story of two snooty brothers getting flustered in Seattle, the show was a massive hit. The multicam ran for an astounding 11 seasons and 264 episodes, just six episodes shy of Cheers.

Melrose Place

Melrose Place took the teenage soapy melodrama of its parent show Beverly Hills 90210 and turned it up to 11. Unencumbered by the restraints of high school, the denizens of Melrose Place were free to spend all their time making everything all dramatic in their hip corner of West Hollywood. They fought, schemed, and of course hooked up with trashy abandon, and the show only got tawdrier and soapier as its run progressed. Viewers ate it up, and the show anchored Fox' Monday night for the entire late 90s and launched Heather Locklear into superstardom.

The Fox hit ran for seven seasons and 226 episodes, and helped launch Fox into legitimacy, if not in taste then definitely in ratings.

The Colbert Report

Stephen Colbert's send up of blowhard narcissist new show hosts has been a hit since its inception. On its very first episode Colbert coined the word truthiness (denoting something that just feels right) and has remained a steady ratings hit and critical darling throughout its run.

The show made an especially bold statement this year when it ended The Daily Show's ten year Emmy winning run for Best Variety Show. The Colbert Report has always had its own voice and audience, but has at times been overshadowed by the mammoth popularity of its Jon Stewart-hosted lead-in. The Emmy win though, legitimized The Colbert Report as a successor that, however successful, didn't just play second fiddle.

DISCLOSURE: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors, and do not represent the views of equities.com. Readers should not consider statements made by the author as formal recommendations and should consult their financial advisor before making any investment decisions. To read our full disclosure, please go to: http://www.equities.com/disclaimer

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The Spin-Off Series that (Actually) Found Success

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One of the biggest media stories this fall is the end of the legendary dramatic series Breaking Bad. But legends never die, or at least in the world of television. They merely get spun off.

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pinwright's progress guide cast details episodes information sitcom bbc one 1946 1947 james hayter clarence wright sara gregory daphne maddox doris palmer

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Pinwright's Progress - BBC1 Sitcom - British Comedy Guide

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A guide to Pinwright's Progress, the 1946 - 1947 BBC One TV sitcom about the staff of a large shop.

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Tracking down the etymology of the phrase "situation comedy" and its abbreviation to "sitcom" is difficult. The Oxford English Dictionary points us to a 1964 Life magazine article by David Martin and the sentence, "Even Bing Crosby has succumbed to series TV and will appear in a sitcom as an electrical engineer who happens to break into song once a week."[1]

But this sentence is not even the first reference to "sitcom" in that particular article. An earlier page (21) contains the following: "Because situation comedies (known hereafter as sitcoms) have become the blue chips of the business, we are in for even more of them this year. Of 35 new shows in evening prime time more than half are sitcoms-and these in addition to Beverly Hillbillies and 14 others that carry over from last year."

Should we believe that Martin coined "sitcom" in 1964 or was his use of it in a popular, consumer magazine just an indication of its widespread use in the TV industry by that time? The answer is unclear and I have not been able-so far-to track "sitcom" down in Variety or other trade magazines. My friend Lang Thompson, however, did find down a piece in the Chicago Tribune that suggests that 1964 was about the time when "sitcom" emerged from industry discourse into popular speech. Columnist Larry Wolters writes, "A score of situation comedies (they call them 'sitcoms' in the trade) have arrived and more are ahead."[3] Wolters's comment suggests that "sitcom" was still a new term to his readers, but not a term he himself (or Martin in Life) coined.

The origin of "situation comedy" is no clearer than that of "sitcom," but it is evident that it was in use way before 1964. In fact, a 1947 Variety article proclaims, "Gag comedy [radio] programs still rate over farce situation or realistic situation comedy shows, judged by a survey of the season now closing. As for gag shows, the 'broad smart comedy' type has a far greater appeal than the 'broad corny comedy' types."[2] I must confess that at this stage of my research I cannot explain what distinguishes farce situation comedy from realistic situation comedy, but, nonetheless, it's obvious that comedy based on narrative, on situation, has long been contrasted with comedy deriving its humor from gags (and a loose or nonexistent narrative).

In fact, situation comedy was so well established on radio and TV before the 1950s that it was in danger of wearing out its welcome. No less a comedian than Bob Hope could argue, "Situation Comedy Becoming Extinct..." in a 1955 Variety issue.[4] TV History teaches us just how wrong he was.

Note also that Hope contends- in 1955! -that "a sameness surrounding most situation comedy formats have [sic] brought about their decline, that while tv viewers didn't mind it so much a few years ago, today [1955] they are more demanding and selective."

Notes

1. David Martin, "Nobody Dares Rock the Boat: The Season's New Shows," Life, September 18, 1964, pp. 21, 24.

2. "Gag Shows Rule Comedy Roost," Variety, June 4, 1947.

3. Larry Wolters, "Enough Comedy on TV for a Good Cry," Chicago Tribune, October 4, 1964, SW16.

4. "Situation Comedy Becoming Extinct, Bob Hope Avers," Variety, November 6, 1955, 29.

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Where/When Did "Situation Comedy" and "Sitcom" Originate?

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Tracking down the etymology of the phrase "situation comedy" and its abbreviation to "sitcom" is difficult. The Oxford English Dictionary points us to a 1964 Life magazine article by David Martin and the sentence, "Even Bing Crosby has succumbed to series TV and will appear in a sitcom as an electrical engineer who happens to break into song once a week."[1] But this sentence is not even the first reference to "sitcom" in that particular article.

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USATODAY.com - So how did 'Frasier' come about?

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Peter Casey, a writer on Cheers and co-creator of Frasier with David Lee and the late David Angell, remembers the show's origins:...

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Pew Research Center for the People and the Press

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Fans Say Yada Yada

Survey Findings

The situation comedy "Seinfeld" may be the most popular television show of its time, but only half of the people who watch it say they'll miss it when it's gone. And even fewer want friends like Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer.

Today, 62% of the public says they watch the program, and, at least for now, "Seinfeld" tops the list of all-time favorite comedy programs. In a new Pew Research Center survey, 14% of Americans name the show as their favorite. M*A*S*H ranks second with 6%.

The tearful farewells fans gave other popular sitcoms, however, are unlikely to follow the "Seinfeld" finale: 51% of viewers say they won't miss the show much. Only 19% of "Seinfeld" viewers say they will miss the show a great deal, another 29% will miss it a fair amount.

Just as the sitcom's trademark indifference is mirrored in these findings, "Seinfeld" viewers reflect the characters: Fans are young, affluent and single. Fully 81% of those under age 30 watch the show compared to just 34% of those over 65; 71% of those earning more than $75,000 tune in compared to 52% of those with incomes under $20,000; and 71% of single people watch the show versus 59% of married folks. But despite these similarities, 54% of viewers say they would not want friends like the sitcom characters.

The public may be ambivalent about a friend exploding through the front door and raiding the fridge, but Kramer is the show's most popular character. With 44% of those who watch "Seinfeld" picking him as their favorite, Kramer comes out ahead in virtually every demographic group. Jerry comes in second with 18% naming the lead character as their favorite, George is picked by 11% and Elaine by 10%. Kramer is also the character fans would like to see spinoff a new series, with 33% saying they would like to see him featured in a new show.

Of the 1,009 randomly selected adults reached by phone May 1-5, three people said Newman should get his own show. The survey has a margin of error of +/- 3.5 %.

Americans know the "Seinfeld" cast. Asked to name any of the four main characters, 54% knew Jerry, 49% knew Kramer, 39% knew George and 35% knew Elaine. What's more, 27% named all four characters.

As many people (69%) said they watched "Cheers" in April 1993, just before that show went off the air, and as many wanted a character to get a spinoff show (58%, vs. 60% for "Seinfeld"). But Frasier, the character who does have a successful spinoff, was chosen in 1993 by only 2% of "Cheers" viewers.

East coasters are more likely to want friends like the New York City characters: 48% of them would like friends like the "Seinfeld" characters compared to just 29% of people who live in the West.

Women like Elaine more than men do: 17% of women viewers picked her as their favorite compared to just 4% of men.

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Fans Say Yada Yada The situation comedy "Seinfeld" may be the most popular television show of its time, but only half of the people who watch it say they'll miss it when it's gone. And even fewer want friends like Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer.