Making Your Way in the World Today Is Much Better If You're Watching 'Cheers'
Making your way in the world today, even in the best of circumstances, takes everything you’ve got. But the last couple of weeks have been brutal, nobody knows what the future holds, you need companionship worse than ever, and you can’t have any. Desperate times call for desperate binge rewatches.
It is time for you to do as I am doing, and watch every single episode of Cheers in order.
Listen: I know that we are living in the golden age of television, and it’s everything we can do to keep up with what’s new, even with this sudden surplus of free time. Diving into a television show with 275 episodes feels daunting. I get it. But you must. (Also, you’re watching Love Is Blind in the golden age of television, so settle down.)
From its first scene, Cheers offers you exactly what you need right now: pure, uncut comfort. A cozy Boston basement bar with a friendly gang of regulars who, though they speak in the setup/punchline rhythm of the multi-camera sitcom, feel like human beings. You know them via cultural osmosis even if you’ve never seen the show: horny former baseball star Sam, dimwitted bartender Coach, know-it-all Cliff, barfly Norm, and Rhea Perlman as herself. Their relationships feel lived-in, and instantly familiar from today’s perspective because like you, they are drinking heavily with a small group of people in an enclosed space.
By the time I was old enough to watch Cheers, in season three or so, it was a well-established Must See TV show, nestled in between Family Ties and Night Court. That it made it that far is something of a miracle, given that in its first season it was one of the lowest-rated shows on television, with only around 15 million viewers per episode. Nowadays, the top-rated show on network television (NCIS! Really!) gets about 10 million, but in 1982, that put Cheers under Joanie Loves Chachi. NBC took a rare chance on quality, let the show breathe for a couple of seasons, and their patience paid off.
And to that '80s teenage viewer the show was a well-made sitcom, but to the middle-aged guy of 2020, there is impressive depth. The pilot episode covers the arrival of Shelley Long’s intellectual snob Diane Chambers, freshly dumped by her professor boyfriend and desperate for work. A running joke in Season One centers around Diane’s multiple college majors, and from an adult’s perspective, it immediately becomes clear: Diane still has no idea what she wants to be when she grows up. Her bookish exterior is an affectation, a persona she has taken on because she's run out of choices. Similarly, Sam’s womanizing is just another expression of his addictive nature. It’s a deeper show than I remember from when I was 12; there’s a full textbook’s worth of subtext about identity and dependence if you choose to look for it.
But you can also just sit back and let the jokes wash over you. Cheers comes from the time when television shows were expected to produce 22 to 26 episodes over the course of a season, and over 11 seasons, it kept up a ridiculously high standard of writing. Today, even the best sitcoms mostly go for the joke at the expense of character, but Cheers never did. The jokes land because they feel honest; they’ve been earned. Each episode is a little one-act play, and that’s before we get to Season Five and they start to feel like French farce.
As Sam Malone, Ted Danson moves like a dancer, all swagger and—as our 21st century televisions reveal—sweat. Danson hasn’t stopped working since, yet he’s still somehow underrated. Shelley Long is perfection, and I will share this here because I think it will deepen your viewing experience: I have it on decent authority that the character of Valerie Cherish was based on her. (I know!) The 1982 fashions are right on point. The eventual casting changes are seamless. It’s a perfect piece of television history, and there are nearly 150 hours of it.
Right now, you want to go anywhere. Might as well make it a place where everybody knows your name. Cheers is on Netflix and Hulu. I’ll save you a seat.
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