Shownotes Transcript
Hi everyone, Joseph Fink here with a surprise announcement. We have a new podcast made by me with Meg Bashwiner, voice of the Night Vale Credits, and Deb, the sentient patch of haze. It is called The Best Worst. In it, we go through some of the most beloved shows in television history, watching first the IMDb Worst Rated and then the Best Rated episodes. What can we learn by watching great television at its best and at its worst?
What you are about to hear is our first episode, which covers the classic sitcom Cheers. So join us to explore the golden age of television at its best and at its worst. The best worst is available wherever you listen to podcasts. Taking your way in the world today takes everything you've got.
Hello, and welcome to the very first episode of The Best Worst, a celebration of the best and the worst of the television we love. Hi, I'm Meg Bashwiner. And I'm Joseph Fink. And we love TV. So we created this show to explore what we all love about popular TV shows by watching both the IMDb viewer best rated and worst rated episodes of a quintessential series. Well,
We were talking a little bit last night about why we decided to do the show. And since this is the first episode, I thought it might be good to get into that.
We have shifted how television works now. It's all on streamers and everything is seven episodes long. And if it's a huge hit, it might get as much as three seven episode seasons. And people really don't watch it. Like we don't have a, we're out of the monoculture, right? So we all are not watching the same episode of television. Like the show we're talking about this week is Cheers and at its highest ratings, it had 33.3, 33.9%.
million viewers to a show. Which is over 10% of the country watching the same show at the same time. It's all just watching Cheers. So it's, yeah, it's so vastly different from our television landscape today where like you have like maybe one friend who watches that one show that you guys can talk about as opposed to
10% of your country being able to just be like, did you see Cheers last night? It does feel like we replaced television with something that can be very good. Some of these shows are amazing, but it's not the same form. Like,
People stopped making this type of television, which was one of our primary forms of entertainment for a century. It really, this form of entertainment to me, that this sort of the heyday of TV multicam shows that we're talking about sitcoms in front of a live audience was sort of bridging the gap between...
film and theater, it really was sort of like the middle ground place. And now I feel like there is no more of that middle ground place. And there's just a canyon between the gap of film and theater when TV shows are now firmly in the film department.
Unless you're watching TV shows like on Dropout. I feel like Dropout is- Dropout.tv is a streamer that does its own shows, highly recommend. But they're much more theatrical than I think film-based. They're game shows and the like. So I guess, yeah, I guess game shows are what we have left in terms of-
theater on TV. So each of the shows on this podcast, in order to try to get to kind of the golden age of the type of television we're talking to, they have to adhere to a set of rules. The main one is we want every show on this podcast to be at least 100 episodes, to really have existed for quite a while on television, to really build up enough variety that the best and the worst are
episode will have this huge gap between them. Just to give you an idea, the TV show we're talking about today is Cheers, which had 275 episodes. So that's quite a lot of episodes. And if you're looking at a TV show that was massively successful, like looking at Secession, I'm just Googling it now, listen to me Google how many episodes, they had 39 episodes of Secession. So a very different thing. Yeah, I mean, Cheers had 29 episodes just in its first season.
The other thing we're doing is we're excluding premieres and finales because those tend to have inflated ratings on IMDb. And we're looking to watch each television show at its absolute best, not necessarily at its most important or cliffhanger-y.
Let's get to today's show, which is, as you said... It's Cheers! Cheers! Which ran for 11 seasons and, as we mentioned, 275 episodes. It premiered in 1982 and it ran until 1993. And Cheers, I watched it as a kid growing up. Did you watch it? You didn't really watch TV as a kid growing up. I didn't watch a lot of TV. My parents were pretty anti-TV. So I...
I knew Cheers. I never watched it. I think if you had asked me before we did this, I would have told you Cheers was like a 70s sitcom because it was always sort of in my head. It was sort of a hazy, like classic sitcom that existed sometime before I was born.
because I just wasn't aware of it while it was running. I was aware of it while it was running. So you said that your parents were very anti-TV. I could say that almost like a third parent in my household was the TV. So yeah, so I watched a lot of TV and watched a lot of like the heyday NBC must-see TV that was really the bread and butter. We used to watch the
Frasier and syndication every night at dinner. We absolutely did watch Frasier. That's the weird thing is I love that. Yeah, that's a we can watch Frasier because it's like pseudo intellectual. I had no idea that Frasier was a spinoff. I didn't know that Frasier was ever in another show. Yeah, the spinoffs of Cheers was Frasier. I also just found out while looking into Cheers today that there was another spinoff, which was just I think it's called let me look at what's called but it's about Carla's family.
And it went red for 13 episodes, was canceled, I believe, mid-season. And many of the Italian-American audience found it very derogatory. So there's that. That's interesting. I would have never guessed. I think that Carla was supposed to be Italian-American. Yeah. I didn't think about her ethnicity. She doesn't play super Italian-American in the episodes we watched. So I just didn't think about it. Carla Tortelli. Carla Tortelli. Well, they never mentioned her last name, but I...
I love that they basically called her Carla Tortellini. Yeah, Carla Tortellini Lasagna Gagagool. While you look that up, I'm going to introduce the first episode we were talking about. This is of 275 episodes of Cheers. This is, according to the fine folks on IMDb, the worst episode. And it is season 10, episode 3, Madame La Carla. Yeah.
A little behind the scenes, we had to re-record this episode due to sound issues, so we actually have recorded a few episodes after. So I apologize if I introduce this theory in another episode and I forgot, but I want to introduce this theory. I have, and we will test it going through this podcast, which is in a show that has run for a while, let's say 10 seasons.
I think the best episode will always be in the middle third, somewhere in like season three to six, somewhere in there, because that's when shows tend to really hit their stride. They've worked out the problems, but they haven't hit a wall or they're repeating themselves yet.
And the worst episode will either be season one when they're still trying to figure themselves out or more likely in one of the last two seasons when they're really kind of everyone involved is done. And this fits that. It's in season 10 out of 11. But just something to keep an eye on as we move forward if these follow that rule.
So yeah, so we sat down and we watched Madame La Carla. Madame La Carla? I think it's Madame because we're evoking the psychics. All right, so the summary of this episode is that we have our A plot where Carla's psychic has decided to retire and name Carla as her successor. And we sort of work through what that means for Carla and what that means for psychics in general. And then our B plot is that Woody-
is in a play that has premiered and he gets a bad review and he feels bad about the bad review. That is what we're working with here. I wouldn't say that the plot for either of these stories is strong. I think that's one of the issues we're running into if we're thinking about, okay, why is this the absolute worst out of 275 episodes? One is it just doesn't have a lot of story going on in it.
These both feel like not even B plots, but like C plots, just like one or two jokes in the background of another, what, an episode that's about something else. Also, it does feel a bit tired. Like the energy of the show, it's just, it really is very low. When you walk into the bar, it's like sleepy. And there is some sort of, it really is lacking dynamicism in this episode at all. The thing that Joseph and I giggle about is that Rebecca, Kirstie Alley, is in this episode and she is,
is in the exact same... She's in two scenes. She's in the exact same spot at the bar doing the exact same thing both times. She's just sorting through a pile of mail. So there's like no... Just like kind of boredly. She seems very bored. The rest of the characters at the bar seem kind of bored. And then the main characters of this episode are Woody and Carla, who are both beloved characters, but they are not the stars of the show. So we're in sort of... It feels like the whole episode is a B-plot. Yeah.
The weird thing, though, is that even though they're both kind of everything feels a little tired, it's also the show at its biggest budget. So one thing I noticed compared to the other episode we watched, the best one, is the bar is so much more crowded with extras in this one. Like they really are throwing money at the show, even as everyone involved is getting a little...
kind of running out of new things to do with it. They're trying to make that up by like, okay, let's instead of like a couple extras in the background, let's put 100 extras in this bar and have people walking around constantly and doing things. And that'll make this feel energetic because it's no longer in the writing or performance.
Yeah, that is sort of a signature thing of Cheers is that it is set... The main bar room set is, like, in an active bar, like, you know, a theatrical version of an active bar. It's obviously not loud like a bar. No one's interrupting Sam to buy a drink. Like, there's, you know... That sort of thing isn't really happening there. But we are on, you know, in a theatrical version of a bar. And...
If you look, there is just 20% more extras in this. And it gets to the point where it is distracting. Like there's a couple of times in this episode where I turned to Joseph and I was like, oh no, bad extra is bad. Because you see the extra in the background, just really pulling focus in like a way that's not funny or good. It's just like, just literally just pulling your eye away from the dialogue that we're endeavoring to hear. There's one scene where
Sam and Carla have sat down to know Frazier and Carla have sat down to talk and it really is just like a very formulaic cut where it's like cut to Frazier cut to Carla cut to the two of them and an extra walks by and then like the next line it's the same it's like cut to this cut to this and then an extra walks by it feels like they're almost in a loop with the way that it is being directed there.
Which is interesting because it's directed by James Burroughs, who directed, if not all of the, did he direct all of the episodes of the show? If not, he directed the plurality of them. Yeah, I don't know. He was listed as one of the creators because I think he directed the pilot. And he's also just a guy, if you look at his filmography, he just, he directs TV. That's what he does. He's directed so many television shows.
And is one of the pioneers of this sort of style of must-see TV. And in this episode, it does feel a little bit tired. It feels a little bit formulaic. It doesn't feel sort of new. It definitely feels like it's on rails. So let's talk about the team behind this, because we do have... We have James Burrow directing, who is an absolute pro. And then we have...
How do we say his name? Feef Sutton? Feef Sutton. Writing, who is also, if you look at his work, just a pro. Like he's a guy who wrote television since the early 80s, wrote it all the way up until his last credit is like 2022. Yeah.
And so these are both people that know a lot about how to write television. In fact, this is not the last time we will hear the very unusual name, Pheave Sutton, this episode. We'll get back to our man soon. So it's not a problem of lack of talent here. These are people who have delivered very good television in the past. I just don't think either of them had anything new to say with this material anymore.
With this material, with these characters, and then also just the structure of how the show was made. So the shows were filmed in front of a live studio audience on a Tuesday night. So Wednesday would be the day that they started working on the episode, and then they would have final scripts in Monday. And so it really was very much, and they did 26 episodes a year, 26 weeks of this. So it really is something that is very much on a machine. It is designed to crank out.
So maybe, you know, we can't fault them. They've made 275 of these episodes. They all certainly can't be groundbreaking knee slappers. But yeah, so it's kind of...
To me, I think it's like sort of a good thing if you can have like, you can make so much that occasionally you make a bad one and it's still good and fine. Like we're talking about the negative things of this episode, but I think that it's still good and fine. And if this was on at 11 p.m. while you were trying to fall asleep with your antenna pointed towards the best signal you could get for this on your black and white TV that's in your bedroom, I think that's great. I think you feel good about it.
Yeah, I mean, it is not. I think if we were just watching this through the entire series, just kind of for fun, I don't think we would think after watching this, that was the worst episode of Cheers. I don't think we would think it was very good. But as you said, it's still like a solid 20 minutes of television. It still does what it does. And that gets to one thing I want to talk about, which is the reason we start with the worst is to see if we can see...
What made this show so loved, even at its absolute worst? And I think you can see a lot of it in this episode. Yeah.
Yeah, it's good characters. It's good characters. It's a good ensemble and creating ensemble. So the first season of Cheers did not do great ratings wise, which I think makes sense because we are these, this ensemble needs to gel. It needs to create, you need to get to know these characters and these relationships in order for that magic to happen or to feel like you're in the bar with them. Like, you know, these people.
Of course, the first time you're there, it's going to feel weird. And the second time and the third time, by the time you get towards the end of the season, you really do get to learn about these characters and their relationships. And that's what makes it interesting is that you feel like you're in a bar and they're funny. Like, it's the jokes are formulaic and tropey, but funny.
the actors are beating them out and the directors are laying it out for you in a way that you find funny. The live audience is very helpful there to, so that you know when to laugh when a joke's been told. So yeah, there is, I think what works about it is the sense of ensemble, both from as a viewer of feeling you're in the room with them. And then also with the live audience, feeling like you're, you have an audience with you, even if you are at home alone.
I think we'll be talking about this a lot in this podcast, but this is very much, I mean, it's quite literally a hangout show. It's a show about people hanging out in a bar. And it's a show designed to make you feel like you're there hanging out with them. That even if you're not having the most entertaining experience of your life...
You are hanging out with your friends. All your friends are there. They're talking. Maybe it's not the most interesting conversation they've ever had, but whatever, you're here and it's nice to not, you know, it fills up the space. It's a classic, like you have a 20 minutes and you don't want it to be quiet. So let's turn on the show and it fills up that silence.
And I do think there's a place for that, that prestige television that's really trying to create great art can't do by definition because it's just trying to do something different.
A couple of things I noticed about Cheers, just even in this episode, that feel very different than modern television is the cold opens are so short and to the point. Cold opens now are kind of treated almost like their own short films. They have setups, they have this, you know, they might be like separate from the episode itself and they're trying to do something. This cold open is literally like two lines and it's just a setup and a punchline and we're out. It's one joke.
That was the part of the process of their writing process for Cheers was that they would give the younger writers, the more green writers, the task of the cold open. So it was like a way for them to sort of cut their teeth and have a little bit of a scene. And it makes sense because it's not narrative the way they do it. It is just literally tell one joke. That's it. I love that. I love including process into performance and having it be like, okay, this was a joke we liked this week. We couldn't find another spot for it that one of our greener writers wrote that you got the cold open. I think that's cool.
One thing that I thought was really good was there, there was one joke in which Cliff was talking about seeing arsenic and old lace and,
And he described this lengthy story about his mother who he lives with finding it hilarious, the older woman killing people and how he wakes up in the middle of the night and she's standing over him making this weird guttural sound in her throat. And it's just such a... It stands out in this episode because most of this episode feels very placeholder. And that felt so weird and specific and interesting that I really liked it. I really felt like I could feel a writer...
Just found a riff that they found kind of funny and went with it. It had a sense of personality that a lot of the episode did not. Agreed. I also think it was performed well too. And that's another thing about this show. The performances are strong. The acting is maybe not the most, we're not staying on the most firm, beautiful acting ground, but the try and the energy is there. And the quickness that these are like, it is a very specific style of performance. And I think they're all nailing it.
It's this sort of style of performance is not going to work on secession. Like Rhea Perlman in this role playing a comedic, you know, four cam three cam sitcom actor would not work. It would feel very wrong in another place, but in this place, they're all working really hard and it's good. It's in this episode. Some of it is a little bit tired. Like the Rebecca, like Kirstie Alley feels like, like if she could have zoomed into this performance, if she could have done this on a zoom call, she would have. Yeah.
Yeah, maybe this isn't fair to Rebecca because I only saw her this. The other ones we watched were Diane. But she's so bad compared to Diane, at least. You know, like Diane has this like, she has great comic timing. She's really there. And yeah, Christy Alley here is just bringing nothing. Like you could have replaced her with a lamp in this episode. I mean, she's not given good material, but that's fair because she does nothing with it. Yeah. A couple other thoughts about this episode. There's just a...
a dude there who looks kind of like Riker from Star Trek. He's got the same beard and the same kind of arched eyebrow, and he's just there. No one ever says his name. He has like two lines. I'm to believe he's a recurring character. Yeah, I think his name is Pete and...
And he was in 42 episodes. But no one says his name. He's just mostly he's just kind of disconcertedly staring at the camera behind people while they talk. He really is so distracting to me. Yeah, he does kind of feel like that extra is bad, but he's not an extra because he like has a name and lines and as a character, but they're just not using him. Again, it speaks to like, oh, we have more budget. Let's bring in some more actors. We'll see if we can use them. And then you can't. You didn't.
I mean, I don't think he was a popular character given his IMDb does not have any pictures. There is no profile picture on his IMDb page. It's just that little gray silhouette. So I don't think that the guy who played Pete, despite looking a lot like Commander Riker, ever did much else with his career, unfortunately.
One thing to note is that this was a sequel episode to a season eight episode that also had Madame. Madame? How do we say that? Makes distracted. I'm looking at this guy's page.
The guy for Pete. Is he Pete or is he? I'm pretty sure he's Pete. You're sure he's not Lee? I am fairly certain, but I've done, I did some research. I think he is Pete. Okay, good. Good. All the Cheers fans out there that are listening to this are like, how dare you? Sorry, there were 275 episodes and I haven't watched Cheers since I was nine. So Madame Lazora was in season eight and
She actually was nominated for an Emmy the first time she was there. So this is sort of, I would assume, a sequel episode to a triumphant episode if it was the kind of episode that gets nominated for an Emmy. So you can see why they would want to bring her back. But I don't know. They just didn't really find anything to do with her. The actress who played her, whose name I did not write down,
She was an English singer who died of an unlisted medical event soon after filming this episode. I think she does her best with the material. She doesn't seem tired. She's bringing it as best she can. But whatever Emmy performance she gave the first time, they just didn't give her the same level of material this time.
My last note, we talked about this. So this is a show that started in the early 80s and ended in the early 90s. So it really, you know, it bridged some styles, some fashions. And the shirts in this episode are just deep early 90s, some really...
great early 90s fashion going on. Oh, yeah. There's a part where Carla and Sam are in the same shot, and the patterns on each of their shirts are absolute chaos. I'm like, what my little tiny black and white television set in my bedroom as a child would have done with this was just...
just chef's kiss. But yeah, the fashions, the fashions on Cheers in general are great. I am, I think the costume design is always excellent. And I'm very impressed, especially the hair when we get to we'll talk more about the hair in the next episode. But okay, well, let's get to it. So we're gonna get to our intermission, which is how was the
Was that theme song? This theme song is such a banger. This theme song is, I would put this in there, is like one of the best theme songs of all time. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a strong argument that this is the best TV theme song ever made. You can't not sing along to it. Yeah, it's catchy. It fits the scene perfectly.
I have some information about this theme song, if you would like. I prepared a little bit of a history lesson because there is some interesting stuff here. Yes. And I will say that I had a friend of a friend who used to do this as his audition song, like his 16 bars, because he wasn't a strong singer. But he knew that if he could hold the performance of this, like you can, you might not be the best singer in the room. But if you show up and do your 16 bars to this song, you're going to be remembered.
And you're going to make the auditioners and the people in the room feel good and have a good feeling associated with you. So I think it's,
If you're auditioning for theater in the early aughts, I think this is probably a really good choice, a nostalgia choice, especially if you're not a strong singer, but a strong performer. So this song was written by Greg Portnoy, who was a songwriter. He had some songs recorded by Dolly Parton and Air Supply. He wrote some songs for the TV show Fame. He was hired to write the music for a musical called Preppies.
which we are theater nerds and I've never heard of that, so I don't think it went anywhere. But the opening song was a song called People Like Us, and the producers of Cheers heard it and wanted to use it for their theme song, but they legally weren't allowed to. It was tied to the musical preppies, and so they asked him to...
to write basically an exact copy that they legally could use. Fortunately, there is on Spotify here, I'm seeing a little EP that has these various drafts. So I can play you short clips of these to give you a sense of where the evolution of this. So this is People Like Us from the musical preppies that they wanted to use. People like us never need to be told, somewhat fair and a tad get you by.
Don't bury me, I'm a bay mare from up... You know, I can see why they felt that would be a good sitcom song. This is My Kind of People, which was his attempt to write an exact copy of that. My kind of people, root for the home team, make it a living, out in...
Unfortunately, the producers of Cheers did not like that song. And so they asked him to try again, which is where he came up with this one, Another Day. Hey, that's another day. One more in the past. Good times slip away too fast.
Okay, Gary. And then there was a third attempt that I guess was bad enough that he did not even include it on his EP of Cheers Attempts. And then his fourth attempt was this song, which you'll notice sounds a lot like the Cheers song, but the lyrics are completely different. Singing the blues when the Red Sox lose. It's a crisis in your life.
on the run cause all your girlfriends wanna be your wife and the laundry tickets in the wall um so obviously they could hear that that had a lot of potential but they were also like gary those lyrics are bad and so he rewrote it uh but they liked the demo enough that as you can hear they just basically had him recreate the demo and that is the story of gary portnoy and the cheers theme he did not as far as i can tell do any other releases of note
after that. So good, though. But it's funny to hear the story of it, that it's written by committee, because usually stuff that's written by committee is terrible. But I think it really does work here. I think, yeah, he found the music, the lyrics, the lyrics were very on the nose. And then once they were like, take your foot off the gas of the on the nose lyrics and just go a little wider, you'll find it. Also, the inclusion of rhythm was good. Yeah.
Adding some drum beats there. The first one was just a demo. So...
They just had them kind of recreate that demo, but with a band. And you could hear that they kept it pretty simple. Even the background chorus is just him tracked six times. He is the only vocalist in that theme song. He's all I need. It's a great song. It's one of the great pieces of music in our time. Yeah, it's a modern classic. Let us get to the best episode of Cheers Out of 275.
Meg, what is it? It's Dinner at 8ish, which is season five, episode 20. I just want to note that is solidly in the middle third. So, so far following my prediction there. Our synopsis here is that Frasier and Lilith invite Sam and Diane over for dinner to celebrate their first week of cohabitation, but things start going wrong when Lilith finds out Frasier and Diane were engaged and she locks herself in the bathroom. Then Sam and Diane have an argument.
Meanwhile, our B-plot is Cliff has agreed to babysit Carla's kids. And this is Dinner at 8-ish. I mean, when you say B-plot, it's literally like two scenes. There's a scene where he agrees to, and then there's a scene where the kids return him to the bar wrapped in, I think, toilet paper.
And that is it. That is the entire B plot. It is almost entirely set. This is an episode that is almost entirely set outside of the bar. Yes, we're offset, but we're in the same style set. We still are in a room. We're in a big, wide room. It's fully a stage, and it's Frasier and Lilith's apartment. And this episode is really successful. I think this episode is really successful because of the performances, because we've
We've got Sam and Diane and who are established as characters. They are the leads of the show. And we have a Frazier and Lilith who are their foils. And Frazier is played by Kelsey grammar, wonderful stage actor and baby Newworth, who is,
just an incredible, incredible stage actor. So there's so much performance talent, and it's performed very tightly. The script is good. It moves. And it's very theatrical. This is very much like watching a play. I don't know the technical term for this, but it's the kind of farce where people are constantly slamming in and out of doors. You know the kind of farce I mean, where it's like, I think on stage, it's often a country estate, but there's just a lot of people coming in and out of doors. And they wrote
That, and when I say they, it's our man, Peeve Sutton is back. Having written the worst episode of Cheers, he also wrote the best episode.
Which kind of speaks to, it speaks to the fact that the problems with Madame LaCarlo were not a problem of talent. Because this is a guy who could clearly deliver a high caliber episode of Cheers as well. Yeah, I think that, I mean, the problems of LaCarlo were just like, we're tired and the machine is keeping, the machine keeps rolling. And we're still in the machine. We have to, it's not, it's that like Lorne Michaels thing with Saturday Night Live. It's like,
We don't start the show because we're ready. We start the show because it's time or 10 o'clock or whatever. I'm butchering this quote and everyone is hating me for it. But we're not putting this episode up because we're done and we think it's perfect. We're putting this episode up because we have to because this is our film schedule. So, yeah. But this episode is great. We get just the classic themes of Cheers in this episode where there's the class dynamic between Sam and Diane, which is also –
played out between the class dynamic between Fraser and Sam and even so between Diane and Lilith because Lilith takes a higher status as she doesn't work in a bar, she's a doctor. So there's that class dynamic that's happening there that is one of the main premises of Cheers. And then it's also the man-woman relationship thing that...
that we see here. So there's the struggle of Willis and Fraser's relationship as they move into cohabitation, the struggle of Sam and Diane's relationship as Diane grapples with the fact that Sam has literally slept with every woman in Boston. So there is that, those dynamics at play. So we're playing our hits here. We've got our good actors in a single set in a tight script talking about class and men and women romantic relationships. Like we're there. Yeah.
Yeah, I think that is one thing that makes Cheers so specifically Boston, you know, in terms of feeling like Boston is that class thing that feels like Boston because no one in the bar is black ever. Yeah, there is not a single white person or not a single nonwhite person in Cheers at any point.
But also Boston is a place where Harvard's there, but also a lot of Boston is very working class. And so it is a show that really plays into that divide between Harvard-Boston and working class Boston. Two issues there is that everyone involved in making this show went to Yale or Harvard. Thief Sutton himself went to Yale.
So it's a show written entirely by Ivy League guys. It's a series about working class people that is maybe not written by working class people. And I think they- Well, no, it's written by TV writers. TV writers can come from a lot of different backgrounds. There's not actually an education requirement for TV writing. It's just that those are the people who get to be in the room.
The other issue I have with how Cheers talks about class, and I think it's very evident here, is I don't think that Cheers is very good at faking intellectual talk.
And I think the issue isn't because a lot of these people are very well educated. I don't think it's because they don't know what they're talking about. I think it's more that there's a little bit of condescending attitude of we want this to have broad appeal. So we have to write lines that sound like something a smart person would say, but that the biggest dummy in the world could understand. Well, yeah, this show is reliant on tropes, which
Which is what it's going to be for a sitcom in the 80s is going to be very reliant on Trump to have what they believe is to be a mass appeal. I think the network note of the time is that we need mass appeal, mass appeal. And what mass appeal means is like this sort of watering down, dumbing down.
The dumbing down style, which as a creator, I don't believe that to be important for mass appeal. I think what's important for mass appeal is to tell a good story. But at the time, it was different. When we're looking at the creators of these shows, they all seem to be like the exact same guy. It's like, oh, you're born in the late 40s, early 50s, and you're a boomer art type.
And that is the plurality of who is making these shows, who's directing them, who's writing them, who's producing them. It's a space that's pretty devoid of people of color. It's a place that's pretty devoid of women. And this is the culture from which this stuff is being creative. There's not a lot of perspective.
No, and it's a sense that I think these people are like, well, we don't need anyone else because we know how to write everyone. There's a sense in the TV room, in the writer's room that
You know, we are the default human model. And so therefore we can kind of write everyone. And they struggle to write women. They struggle to write women. They struggle. They struggle to write. You know, I think they had to resort to tropes and archetypes because that's all they had for a lot of different types of people. Going through this episode, going back to the cold open, it's once again just a short bang, bang, and we're out. And one thing I really enjoyed here is that Ted Danson just goes ahead and laughs at the joke.
He does not even try to hide that. He just, it's not like a Jimmy Fallon style break where he's trying to suppress it. He kind of laughs in character and it works.
But I found it kind of enjoyable that Ted Danson's just like, yeah, it was a funny joke. I'll laugh at it. Yeah. I mean, Ted Danson is so good. All these actors are very good, but Ted Danson is a special talent. Yeah. As I think is Bebe Neuwirth watching this episode as well. She's given less to two, but it's just so dynamic on screen and so serious and just really, yeah, holds the moment. It's very physically dynamic on set. Yeah. I mean...
Ted Danson has a thing that he has that Chevy Chase physical comedy going, but he's also very good at verbal. He can kind of do both, which I think a lot of people struggle to be equally good at both, and I think he could...
He was so tall that he was kind of gangly, and that made the physical comedy really funny. But he was also very good at the one-liners. Very good at the one-liners. And also, listen, there are four cameras on these people. They're playing to a live audience and four cameras. This is not an easy thing to do. There is a lot of different things to consider here, and he's really very solid in it.
Talking about physical comedy, one thing I noticed, I feel like modern sitcoms are a lot more verbal-based. They're a lot more about just here's a series of one-liners. And a lot of Cheers is physical comedy. There's a lot of people tripping in this episode, people falling on couches. There's a really good piece of physical comedy early on between Kelsey Grammer and B.B. Neuwirth where the
They're fighting over how to present the magazines on the coffee table because they're both used to kind of having their way in an apartment. And she throws the magazines at him, which causes them to fly all over. But she also throws it so hard she goes flying back on the couch. And it's just this – it's like a single physical comedy beat, but they both are playing it.
To its absolute max. And it creates a very funny moment. Yeah. And that is the thing that we're working with here. In this bridge between theater and film.
Yeah, I'll point out that I was looking at some fan notes about this episode online and someone pointed out that apparently a running joke later in the series is that Lilith has a terrible singing voice.
But in this episode, she sings and B.B. Newarth just uses her regular voice, which was Broadway level. She had sung on Broadway. And so it's just a little inconsistency there is that in this episode, Lilith has a Broadway ready voice. Yeah. I mean, there's a scene around the piano. Yeah. Kelsey Grammer just sits down and plays the piano, which, by the way, there's also just such a classic sitcom apartment that they can fit in a Boston apartment, a straight up. It's a grand piano. It's like a grand piano.
It's maybe not a concert grand piano, but it is a grand piano. There's a piano in Cheers as well. In the last episode, the Madame LaCarla, she sits down and starts playing the piano. Then Kelsey Grammer tries to give her some notes on playing the piano, which I think is, I think it's cool. I think it's cool to have a set that has stuff in it that people can use, like actual things happening here, as opposed to, I guess, yeah, the sets now that are all just in someone else's cold house that are...
That are all just being filmed at our neighbor's house across the street from us. Yeah, we had a TV show filmed across the street from us for a month, which was not super fun. Although we did once see Kristen Bell walk to her car. But I would just walk up and down the street every time I needed to get anywhere. And I would just be saying, build a set, build a set. Because when you build a set, you can do, you know, they work that space to its maximum. Every part of that space is used. They're constantly using the props.
There's a running joke where Ted Danson, his character is hungry. And so he's just eating everything. And he does a lot of good prop work with just the various bowls of chips and breads and...
And the thing with build a set is that when we build a set, we have room for the cameras. We have room for the lights. We have it tailored to what the actors and the scene needs in TV. Now you're in house, you're in a department store, you're in a place that. Or in a lot of them, like all the Marvel stuff, they are just, they have like three props and then they're surrounded by green screens, even in scenes where you wouldn't think it, if they're just like in a house that's still green screened, because it's cheaper than renting house.
Yeah. It's that neo-futurist theater thing where it's like, oh, you have to pretend to be tired? Just go run around the block. We have these things in our toolbox that we can use that are actual tools. We don't need to bring sand to the beach here. A note about the song that Fraser and Lilith sing together at the piano. It's the song Our House, which was written by Nash of Crosby, Stills, and Nash.
And is, according to the internet, a song he wrote about living with Joni Mitchell. I checked both their Wikipedia pages and there's no mention of them having a relationship. But I guess at some point they were living together. They all did. Those Laurel Canyon days. They were all in there. It was one big pile. Some other notes about this episode. It's such a different time that they're having a...
dinner party to the two people that live there and they've invited two of their friends and
everyone is wearing full formal wear everyone's the men are in suits the women are in like dresses heels pantyhose full on yeah they just it is full formal for just like having friends over to your apartment yeah well she has it catered as well yeah well that is so that's that's sort of an ending punchline is that she secretly had it catered by of course a woman that it turns out why am i blanking on ted dance's character that sam has slept with because he slept with everyone yes
There's some fun jokes about being horny about dip. Yeah, there's some jokes about being horny about dip. The way the episode ends is very tropey and I bristle at where they end up locking both of the women in the bathroom and go upstairs and smoke cigars, which feels like
So very of its time actually feels even feels further back than of its time. It feels like that is like, uh, it feels very, I love Lucy plot. Like I agree. It, it really let the episode down. It's this misogynist button to an episode that I think is otherwise playing pretty nuanced in a sitcom format with everyone's feelings. Everyone has an opportunity to feel hurt and insecure, uh,
And they're playing with that and kind of letting everyone have that moment and ending that with like, women be yapping, let's lock them up and have a cigar. It just felt like it was letting down everything they had done up until that point. When it feels like of the time, it really should have been the other way around, where it's like it really should have been.
the women locking the men in the bathroom and then going upstairs to have a cigar, like that sort of second wave feminism thing. But that was just like completely not happening. And then nowadays it would just be like, they're just all quietly texting in different, different penthouses. Yeah.
Some other notes I have, there was, as I said, way fewer extras in this one, not just in the apartment. The apartment obviously didn't have extras, but the bar, there was like two tables. Yeah, I think the idea when creating the show is that they wanted it to feel real. They wanted it to feel like a bar. They wanted it to feel like there was always something going on in the background that could be interesting. I think the notes given to the background actors were like, there's always going to be a camera on you, so make sure you're playing to that camera. Yeah.
That is a difficult note to give an extra. But yeah, so there's not that in this episode. Yeah, my other note about this episode is that the blow dryer from the hair and makeup department was working overtime. Everyone has like a proper blowout. Well, yeah, because this is season five. So this is late 80s. So we are in like the full swing of what we remember as the 80s here. Yes, Kelsey Grammer's got a blowout. Ted Danson is like, it looks like he...
left the car wash in a convertible during the blow dry part and showed up on set. It's, it truly is. It truly is great. Yeah.
Shelley Long's hair is like perfectly coiffed. Bebe Neuwirth, they were like using that diffuser on her. So it's good. Some good hair work. Any other notes on this episode? I'm going to go back to the hair stuff. Again, talking about the bridge between theater and film. In a film, the sitcom, because it is in front of a studio audience, you do have to kind of go a little bit bigger with hair, makeup, and costume just from a visual standpoint so that people in the audience can actually see
can see what the intent is of how these characters look. Whereas when we move to film and we move to TV nowadays, there's so much more subtlety in look and costuming. And I love the big, fun, fluffy hair and the blue eyeshadows of this show. One thing I noticed about this is there's just no attempt to make it feel like real life. And that can be really enjoyable. Like...
I think because we watch TV on high-definition televisions now, people who make TV feel pressured to really deliver little details you'll notice in people's sets, people's houses, what people are wearing. And this very much just feels like a theater set and theater costumes. And that can be enjoyable because these people are here to perform for us.
Well, it's pre-reality TV. So it lives in a world before we were inside everyone's home or we were inside everyone's office. It is pre that time. So the hunger for reality didn't even really exist because we didn't even know that we wanted to eat it. Right. So, yeah, it is this sort of fossilized world of before we were inside Khloe Kardashian's bedroom. Yeah.
So watching this show for the first time, I think, since you were a kid, how did you feel? Like, how did it change you?
How you felt about it? Well, yeah, I'm looking at it now from a lens of a person who is a creator of performing art and a maker of performing art. So I'm looking at it to sort of see what tools they're using and what methods they're using. And looking at it, the nuts and bolts of it from an intrigue. As a kid, I watched it just because it was on. And I was like, this is funny. And we're all together. We're sitting down. We're watching it. We're laughing. And then there's a Tide commercial. And that is just...
Or I'm trying to fall asleep in my childhood bedroom and I've got three channels and this is what is on one of them. So I was not putting my brain into it when I was watching as a kid. I was just observing it and now I'm looking at it from all the different things. Just because I find it is something so wonderful. As a creator, I'm in awe of it and I want to be like, well, how did you do it? How can we look at it to take apart the pieces just to see?
For me, I'd say that it basically met my expectations. Like, it was the show I thought it was, which is just this classic...
solid sitcom, this kind of platonic ideal of what a sitcom looks like. That here's a group of people, we've set up a space for them, and we have these rapid fire punchlines. I don't think it surprised me, but it also very much delivered on what I thought it would, which is just... This is the previous version of television that we talked about, this version of television that cranks out 29 episodes a year. This is it working at the height of its powers. These are
people really working in that form. And speaking of that, the next show we're going to watch is from a different era of television. What's that next show? We're going to be looking at House, House MD. House MD. I'm excited about this because I never watched it on television, but it was definitely one of the ones I got on Netflix discs in the mail. I watched several seasons of House that way.
And it's a very different form of this kind of deliver a solid product every week. But it's one that I was a big fan of. I'm interested to revisit. Same. Cool. So if you enjoy this, please consider supporting us on Patreon. And that will give you access to our Patreon-only show. So we will be doing these episodes, the best worst, every other week. And then on the in-between weeks, we will be doing the middle list, where we will be discussing the exact middle
middle-rated episode of the show we discussed in The Best Worst to see what the show looks like when everything is exactly average. That episode for Cheers was season two, episode five, Sumner's Return, which is sort of a sequel to the pilot episode. We will also use those episodes to answer any Patreon messages or emails you have.
So please join us there because otherwise you'll be missing half our episodes. Yeah. We also, in that show, there's a Patreon exclusive only show called The Littlest where we pontificate about what it would be like if we showed the show to our three-year-old and what we think she would think. So that is all available on our Patreon. And if not, we'll see you in two weeks with House. Until then, sometimes you just want to go. Where everybody knows your name. Do-do-do-do-do.
There it is. For more, subscribe to The Best Worst wherever you get podcasts. And remember that we are currently entirely Patreon supported, so join to get access to our bi-weekly The Middleist episodes where we watch the exact most average episode of the show we covered the week before. I love you. Goodbye.