Coach (Nicholas Colasanto): I'm working on a novel. Going on six years now. I think I might finish it tonight.
Diane (Shelley Long): You're writing a novel?
Coach: No, reading it.
The great thing about Cheers! was that, although it was ostensibly about a bar, it was really about the people in the bar. The place where everybody knows your name.
When it finished its 11–year run, viewers felt as if they knew the folks on the show — their strengths, their weaknesses, their personality quirks — so well that sometimes I think any one of them could have starred in a spinoff and been successful.
Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) was the character who was spun off and had an 11–year run of his own, which is kind of ironic since he wasn't in the Cheers! cast when the show premiered on this day in 1982. In the first episode, "Give Me a Ring Sometime," the emphasis was on the barmaid who would be viewers' introduction to Frasier's woeful love life — Diane Chambers (Shelley Long).
She wasn't a barmaid at the time. She came in to the bar with her fiancé. They planned to go to Barbados, where they would be married, but Diane's fiancé wanted to get the ring from his ex–wife, so he left Diane at Cheers! with a promise to return.
By the end of the episode, though, it was clear that he was not going to return, that he had probably reconciled with his ex–wife. Forlorn Diane was offered the job of a barmaid.
Her conversation with her first customers kind of set the tone for the series:
"Welcome to Cheers," she told the middle–aged couple. "My name is Diane. I will be serving you. Why don't you sit down right over here? You know, I should tell you, parenthetically, that you are the first people that I have ever served. In fact, if anyone had told me a week ago that I would be doing this, I would have thought them insane. When Sam over there offered me the job, I laughed in his face. But then it occurred to me, here I am, I'm a student — not just in an academic sense but a student of life. And where better than here to study life in all its many facets? People meet in bars, they part, they rejoice, they suffer, they come here to be with their own kind. What can I get you?"
To which the man replied, reading from a phrase book in broken English, "Where is police? We have lost our luggage."
The episode was also a setup for the other people in the bar, especially the proprietor, Sam (Ted Danson), who had been a major–league baseball player until his struggle with alcohol ended that chapter in his life.
Many of the characters who went on to be regulars on the show were there — waitress Carla (Rhea Perlman) and patrons Norm (George Wendt) and Cliff (John Ratzenberger).
"Coach" (Nicholas Colasanto), the bartender, was there, too, but he died of a heart attack a few years later, and the character was written out of the series. Woody (Woody Harrelson) was brought on as Coach's replacement.
And that is probably what prevented the episode from being regarded as one of the best of the series. The first episode essentially introduced the viewers to the characters in the series, and that took most of the time.
So the first episode couldn't be too in depth. There simply wasn't enough time, you see.
It served its purpose, though. It got the audience hooked and set the stage for the show's 11–year run. And that provided plenty of time to explore various personalities and themes.
Good thing for all of us, too.
