"Do you know what bugs me about you? The cologne you wear is totally without nuance." - Shelley Long as Diane Chambers
Cheers: The Complete First Season DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
It is a place where everybody knows your name, where the friendly bartender is already pouring your favorite drink as you walk in the door for a night of fun. Cheers premiered on September 30, 1982 on NBC. The show struggled to find an audience during its first season, even though it was playing against inferior fare like Simon & Simon and Too Close for Comfort. The show was nearly canceled, but thanks to strong word of mouth and several Emmy Awards, viewers began to find it. It went on to run for 270 episodes and eleven seasons.
In the pilot episode, "Give Me a Ring Sometime," Dr. Sumner Sloan (Michael McGuire) and his snooty teaching assistant Diane Chambers (Shelley Long) arrive at Cheers, a Boston bar owned by former Red Sox pitcher Sam "Mayday" Malone (Ted Danson). Sumner has impulsively proposed to Diane, and they are eloping to the Caribbean. Before they leave, Sumner wants to retrieve a ring from his ex-wife, so he deposits Diane at the bar while he runs this errand.
While awaiting Sumner's return, Diane meets the staff and regular patrons of the bar. Ernie "Coach" Pantusso (Nicholas Colasanto), who once coached Sam, is the absentminded but friendly bartender. Carla Tortelli (Rhea Perlman) is the bar's loudmouthed, slightly obnoxious waitress. Norm Peterson (George Wendt) is an accountant who seems to spend more time in the bar throwing back beer than his does at his office working. Cliff Clavin (John Ratzenberger), another regular, is a mail carrier and the king of useless information.
Diane, who prefers Shakespeare to Schlitz, is obviously out of her element in the bar. She resents Sam's flagrant womanizing, Carla's constant put downs, and what she views as an overall lack of intellect in Cheers. But while Diane is book smart, she is no student of human nature, and she is probably the last person in the bar to realize that Sumner is not going to come back. Alone, and now unemployed, she reluctantly accepts Sam's offer of a waitress job.
Cheers avoids the usual sitcom focus on biological family in favor of the "families" that people create for themselves with their friends and coworkers. Cheers' creators were greatly influenced by another classic "surrogate family" show - The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Like MTM before it, Cheers' first season manages to be much stronger and self assured than those of other shows. This is due to strongly defined characters combined with an excellent cast.
While the episodes are often outrageously funny, the show's humor is character-based. The laughs arrive from the personalities and foibles of the group rather than from wacky situations. Over the course of the twenty-two episodes in season one, each of the secondary characters is also given one or two major plotlines of their own (the exception is John Ratzenberger as Cliff, who was not considered a regular in the first season). This allows us to get to know Coach, Carla, and Norm even better.
Danson and Long are excellent at portraying two people who are attracted to each other in spite of their better judgment. They each see the other's flaws and quirks - and often needle each other about them - but they still cannot help themselves.
Sometimes this attraction is overt, as in "Let Me Count the Ways." In this episode, Diane is devastated when her cat Elizabeth Barrett Browning dies, but the gang ignores her pain in favor of watching a Celtics game on TV. Eventually, she explodes at Sam. Long is terrific in this scene, expertly going back and forth between grief and anger, sometimes in the same sentence. As the argument escalates, their attraction grows, leading to several kisses.
The show is just as effective in conveying their affection for one another in subtle ways. In "Sam at 11," Sam is picked by an old friend who is now a reporter to be part of a "Where Are They Now" report on the evening news. Diane warns him not to do it, saying that whenever she sees that kind of thing, she always just feels sorry for the person being interviewed. Sam ignores her advice and consents to the interview, but is crushed when he gets dropped halfway through the story about his greatest baseball moment because a better athlete has been found. Diane does not point out that she had been right all along. Instead, she comforts Sam and asks to hear the end of his story. He tells her, knowing full well she does not understand a word of what he is saying.
The twenty-two episodes of season one are divided onto four discs. The discs themselves feature pictures of individual cast members. The simple menu design does not feature a play all option, only allowing the viewer to play individual episodes. The episodes are divided into chapters that correlate to the original commercial breaks (with an extra one after the opening credits), but the menus do not allow the selection of individual scenes.
