Cheers’ 30th Anniversary: What You Never Knew About the Show

  • Cracks started to show in the rest of the cast’s working relationship with Long during what would be her final season. “Cheers” director Thomas Lofaro remembers, “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, just talking it to death.” To this day, co-star Rhea Perlman (Carla) doesn’t want to talk about what led to Long’s departure (“I don’t think it’s worth it, at this point in life”), but Danson admits, “I had trouble hanging around [Long] until we stood onstage together, and then I was in heaven.”
  • “Cheers” was a bona fide hit when Long left in 1987, so the search to find her replacement wasn’t easy. To play hard-charging businesswoman Rebecca Howe, the producers loved Kirstie Alley, but the network didn’t think she could be funny. So to make the network happy, they brought in a pre-“Basic Instinct” Sharon Stone, Kim Cattrall (a decade before “Sex and the City”), and future “CSI” star Marg Helgenberger to audition. But they still insisted Alley was perfect for the role, and the network eventually gave in. Casting director Jeff Greenberg remembers, “NBC finally said, ‘Well, if they are that passionate about her, how can we deny [them]?’” And they were proven right: Ratings actually went up in Alley’s first “Cheers” season.
  • By the time Season 11 rolled around, Danson had had enough and announced he was leaving the show. “For a couple of years, we were all saying, ‘Are we going to do this forever?’ We were looking for an exit,” he says now. But Harrelson remembers that one unnamed network executive “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.”
  • “Cheers” closed its doors for good in 1993, with 40 million viewers tuning in to watch the final episode. In the nearly twenty years since, there’s never been a “Cheers” reunion, but Alley’s open to it: “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.” But producer Glen Charles says, “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.”

Article Appeared @http://tv.yahoo.com/news/-cheers–30th-anniversary–what-you-never-knew-about-the-show.html

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