As a baseball player for the Red Sox, Sam Malone (Ted Danson) was never seriously considered for the Hall of Fame. To begin with, he was a relief pitcher, and only the most otherworldly of those have any business in Cooperstown. “Mayday” Malone, on the other hand, had a career derailed by a drinking problem, not to mention a pitch nicknamed the “Slider of Death,” not because it was lethal to opposing hitters but because it tended to get hit back over the Green Monster. (Sam’s teammates coined the phrase.)
As the main character on a sitcom, though, Sam was part of a phenomenon so astonishing and unprecedented that you could split the series into halves, and each would be a plausible contender for a TV Hall of Fame like this one. The first five seasons of Cheers, which focused on the recovering alcoholic’s incendiary romance with the disdainful, Ivy League–educated, grammar-correcting waitress Diane Chambers (Shelley Long), are a guaranteed inner-circle member—a smashing ensemble comedy whose lead characters perfected the will-they-or-won’t-they model that has become a foundational cliché of television. But seasons 6 through 11, which locked Sam into a fitfully adult relationship with the bar’s new manager, Rebecca Howe (Kirstie Alley), then ruefully concluded that he was better off by himself, would be a lock for inclusion as well.
Rather than merely put Sam and his castmates through the usual paces over and over, the series dared to ask itself, and us, what might actually happen to such people were they to experience the situations devised by the show’s writers, taking into account the effects of age and disillusionment, the painful recognition (or denial) of failure, and the way the inevitability of death makes some people double-down on their pathologies and makes others work harder to subdue them and create something like a contented life. To put it in terms Sam would understand, Cheers had Sandy Koufax’s peak, but instead of retiring early, it kept going for the comedy equivalent of Nolan Ryan’s career—and damned if it didn’t achieve the impossible. No long-running series in TV history had a better idea of precisely what it was or articulated it so clearly over such a long span of time without any notable loss of inventiveness. And no long-running series has reinvented itself as vividly, much less as successfully.
As written by brothers Glen and Les Charles (who created the series and oversaw the first five seasons) and as directed by James Burrows (who helmed all but one episode of the show’s first four seasons, and more than 200 out of 275 episodes), Cheers was always content to be an intimate, even small sitcom—practically a weekly repertory stage production, confined mainly to the bar, Sam’s office, and the poolroom, with action on the street indicated by silhouettes, footfalls, and strategically overheard bits of dialogue. But there was nothing minor about Cheers’ artistry. Week in and week out, the show’s writers, directors, and cast pulled off tiny miracles of characterization and timing, and the scripts covered the spectrum of comedic possibilities in the space of a half hour minus commercials, moving from poignant barroom-loser melancholy (with nearly dramatic moments that evoked the lighter moments in The Iceman Cometh of all things) to literal bedroom-door-slamming farce to Abbott and Costello–style smart-dumb wordplay (often courtesy of Woody Harrelson’s good-hearted but dim-witted bartender, Woody Boyd, and John Ratzenberger’s know-it-all postal carrier, Cliff Clavin) to postgraduate cultural commentary (when Diane recuts Woody’s home movies, Woody says his dad liked it but thought it was “derivative of Godard”).
In its first incarnation, Cheers was a dazzling romantic comedy, pitting Danson’s streetwise ladies’ man Sam against Long’s pretentious but indomitable Diane. Both are prideful, even arrogant people, with frequent delusions of grandeur, yet at the same time vulnerable. They boast and preen because they’re not-so-secretly terrified by the possibility that their happiest years are behind them and they’re doomed to live lives that make no impression on anyone other than those who know them personally. They are the biggest personalities in the bar—but when the main stage of your life is a bar, how big are you, really? And yet they complete each other, as Jerry Maguire would say, even as they pick at each other’s scabs and drive each other batty. “Do you know what the difference is between you and a fat, braying ass?” Diane asks in the season 2 finale, where they break up for the first of many times. “No,” says Sam. “The fat, braying ass would!” Diane says. She slaps him; he slaps her back. “You hit me,” Diane says. “Well, not hard,” Sam says. “What does that mean?” Diane asks. “Not as hard as I wanted to,” he admits.
The volatility of their relationship would raise hackles today. They don’t just insult each other, to an extent that many would consider emotional abuse, they manhandle and strike each other. In the first-season finale, Sam promises to bounce Diane off every wall in his office; not that he would actually do it—it’s more of a Honeymooners’ “Pow, right to the moon!” type of pledge, made at the last possible cultural moment before the threat of domestic violence ceased being acceptable comedic fodder—but it still expresses a level of desperate, angry frustration rarely seen in TV romances now. “You disgust me,” Diane tells him, right before their first kiss. “Are you as turned on as I am?” Sam asks. “More!” she gasps. They are uniquely suited and unsuited to each other, natural enemies who can’t keep their hands off each other. There are few better TV examples of sexual attraction as a chemical phenomenon than Sam and Diane. “You two should not only not get married,” warns a marital expert played by John Cleese in season 5. “You should never see each other again… you have absolutely nothing in common… you have an appalling lack of communication.” Diane asks about the idea that opposites attract, and Cleese responds, “Ah, the song of the truly desperate!” Those two thoughts aren’t mutually exclusive. Sam and Diane keep proving this time and again, to the horror of their friends and colleagues, who want them to be happy but can’t stand their simpering when they’re enjoying each other or their corrosive rage when they’re at odds.
When her contract was up after five seasons, Long decided she wanted to be a movie star. This wasn’t a great choice for her, even if Troop Beverly Hills still has its nostalgic middle-aged fans, but it did wonders for Cheers. The show had gone through every iteration of the Sam-and-Diane relationship over five years, up to and including her being understandably afraid for her life whenever she was around him. There might have been another season or two’s worth of stories out of having them get married (instead of her leaving Sam at the altar in her final appearance as a regular character) and perhaps even having a baby, but that also would have pulled the focus away from the bar.
Though Rebecca was introduced as a would-be romantic conquest for Sam—an icy professional immune to his charms—the series abandoned the idea (and that initial characterization of Rebecca, once everyone saw how much funnier Kirstie Alley was at playing a mess) quickly and devoted its energy to building a full-on ensemble. The show’s back half took advantage of all the time it spent in early seasons turning Woody; the philosophical barfly Norm (George Wendt); Cliff; the sarcastic but fertile waitress Carla (Rhea Perlman); and Diane’s bitter psychiatrist ex Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) into characters the audience had come to love just as much as (if not more than) the central couple.
Sam’s relationship with Rebecca is less explosive, and therefore less superficially exciting, even though she’s even more highly strung than Diane was and more prone to burst into tears, à la Lucy Ricardo, when things don’t go her way. She enters his life when he’s getting over Diane, doubling-down on his womanizing as a reaction against losing a woman he assumed was the great love of his life. Their struggle to negotiate a working relationship is as fascinating as Sam and Diane’s almost entirely sexual bond, but thornier, because so much of it is about delaying gratification or finding middle ground in a dispute, rather than continuing to fight until one party either climbs into bed or storms out into the night.
The two phases, or ages, of Cheers (Diane and Rebecca) feel like childhood/adolescence and adulthood. Its binding narrative is the stop-and-start evolution of Sam Malone, who goes f
rom arrogant peacock to grizzled old rooster, learning to stay in contact with his inner horny teenager without letting it rule his actions or his self-perceptions.
Shelley Long had worked miracles in making Diane lovable. And the sense of loneliness that underscored that relationship neatly fit the show’s slightly darker earlier seasons, where there was room for an episode like “Endless Slumper,” in which Sam candidly tells Diane about his fear of falling off the wagon again, or “Coach’s Daughter,” where the sweet but addled bartender Ernie “Coach” Pantusso (Nicholas Colasanto, who died midway through production of season 3) tries to convince his daughter not to settle for marrying a jerk out of a belief that she’s not pretty enough to do better.
Once it was clear that Rebecca was, at most, going to be another conquest for Sam, Cheers became a more relentless joke-delivery system, trusting that its writers and cast could go punch line for punch line with any comedy in TV’s past, present, and future without needing the narrative and emotional spine that Sam and Diane’s relationship provided.
Whether it was Norm’s one-liners upon entering the bar (“It’s a dog-eat-dog world, and I’m wearing Milk-Bone underwear”); Frasier’s constant struggle to fit in with the blue-collar crowd he was so desperate to impress (in one episode, he tries reading them A Tale of Two Cities, but has to incorporate attack helicopters and the evil clown from Stephen King’s It to keep the gang entertained); Cliff’s windbaggery (it’s a little-known fact that Cliff was the original mansplainer), which eventually lands him on Jeopardy! (asked to recognize the real names of Cary Grant, Tony Curtis, and Joan Crawford, Cliff suggests, “Who are three people who have never been in my kitchen?”); or the annual “Bar Wars” episodes where Cheers faced off against the more successful crowd from Gary’s Olde Towne Tavern, Cheers’ comic reserves seemed everlasting.
The show and its characters got a bit broader and dumber as they got older, to the point where Sam realized the only thing in his life not calculated to attract women was his love of the Three Stooges. But even at an advanced age, Cheers could lean back and deliver, if not Mayday’s patented Slider of Death, then a vintage fastball. The series’ eleventh and final season opens with Rebecca accidentally setting fire to the bar. As workmen rebuilt the place, the show’s writers found a way to restore the more down-to-earth, and at times outright melancholy, tone of the Diane years. The characters were older and a bit sadder now, none more than Sam, who realized he suffered from sex addiction and revealed to Carla that he had been wearing a hairpiece for years.
The Charles brothers returned to write the series finale, the first script with their names on it since Rebecca’s introduction six years earlier. Rather than ignore all that had happened in their absence and focus on the vintage years, the finale turned into a survey of the series’ bifurcated history, as well as the most satisfying sitcom end of all time.
Diane returns just long enough for her and Sam to rekindle their sexual flame before they again recognize that it’s the only part of their relationship that ever worked. The supporting characters all move on with their lives in the manner of most series-enders—Woody and Norm get new jobs, Rebecca gets married (albeit to a plumber rather than the corporate baron of her dreams)—but first gather to support Sam after his latest failure with Diane.
In a simple, delightful scene, the gang sits around a Cheers table smoking cigars and contemplating the meaning of life. Some of the suggestions are silly (Cliff the mailman argues for comfortable footwear), some are profound (Carla the mom suggests that having kids is what matters most), and some are spare and poignant (struggling to tell the group what they’ve meant to him, Frasier the logorrheic therapist can’t find the words). Finally, the bull session breaks up as each member of the group heads home to a life much fuller than what Sam believes he has. It’s up to Norm to slip back in and explain that what matters most in life is what you love.
(Even in this quiet, bittersweet moment, the Charles brothers’ instincts for when and how to insert a joke are as keen as ever: Norm asks if Sam knows what he loves, and when Sam replies, “Beer, Norm?,” Norm bellies up to the bar, shrugs, and says, “Yeah, I’ll have a quick one.”)
Norm leaves, and as Sam looks around the place he bought at the lowest point of his drinking problem, but that somehow gave his post-baseball life order and meaning, he understands what his favorite customer was trying to tell him, running his hand along the bar as he mutters to himself, “Well, I’ll tell ya: I’m the luckiest son of a bitch on earth.”
When a lone customer knocks on the door, Sam turns to him and utters the series’ elegant final words—really, the only last line that made sense for this magnificent show about a bar where everybody knows your name:
“Sorry. We’re closed.”
—AS & MZS
Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008–2013) Total score: 112
When he pitched Breaking Bad to executives at AMC, series creator Vince Gilligan promised, “We’re gonna take Mr. Chips and turn him into Scarface.” That sounds simplistic, even glib. But the result was so fiendishly intricate and altogether thrilling that TV drama’s post-Sopranos antihero boom could have ended with it, for what could top the story of Walter White’s transformation into the family-deceiving, drug-dealing, bomb-planting Heisenberg, the Mephistopheles of Albuquerque?
But watch Breaking Bad enough times (not a bad idea considering the complexity of its plot), and Gilligan’s pitch feels reductive. For one thing, what little we see of Walter White, high school chemistry teacher, in seasons 1 and 2 implies that he was never entirely Mr. Chips. As presented by Gilligan and his writing staff, and as incarnated by star Bryan Cranston, Walt is clearly as bored by his chemistry class as it is by him. The mutual contempt displayed by Walt and his former student and future drug-cooking partner, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), is just a more extreme, comical version of Walt’s relationships with nearly every other significant person in his life, including his put-upon and very pregnant wife, Skyler (Anna Gunn), her sister Marie (Betsy Brandt), and Marie’s husband, Hank Schrader (Dean Norris), a barrel-chested DEA agent with the braying laugh of a jock who likes to stuff nerds into lockers. The only person Walt treats with undiluted affection is his teenage son, Walter White Jr., aka Flynn (R. J. Mitte), who has cerebral palsy. When Walt is diagnosed with lung cancer—the inspiration for his criminal career—it’s unclear who outside of his immediate family would miss him.
In almost every early scene, Walt exudes the specific resentment of a man who thinks himself entitled to more than he already has and hates every instant spent in the company of those he deems intellectual or moral inferiors. His second job at a local car wash is so personally degrading to a man who thinks himself a genius (and perhaps is one) that as he runs the cash register and wipes down students’ cars, his mortification seems to shade over into masochistic pleasure. It’s as if Walt has become so detached from himself that he’s observing his own suffering and cruelly laughing at it, just as Breaking Bad viewers will laugh at twists of fate in seasons to come.
The series observes a version of the Godfather or Sopranos template, building each season around a series of escalating rivalries between Walt and would-be competitors, employers, or doppelgängers, including Raymond Cruz’s hot-tempered Tuco Salamanca in seasons 1 and 2; Giancarlo Esposito’s fast-food magnate and secret drug lord Gus Fring in seasons 2 through 4; and Michael Bowen’s neo-Nazi gang leader Jack Welker in season 5 (which was split into two mini-seasons, each with a rise-and-fall structure). Throughout, Walt contrives to keep his criminal alter ego a secret from Skyler, Flynn, Hank, Marie, and other law-abiding loved ones—a process that feels desperate, at times comically so, at first, but seems more knowing and playful once Walt starts getting away with bigger outrages. At one point, Hank is on the verge of accepting that Gus’s murdered chemist Gale Boetticher (David Costabile) was Heisenberg, but Walt, unable to allow anyone else to take even posthumous credit for his work, no matter the benefit to himself, steers Hank away
from that theory.
As a chemist, Walt has had a lifetime of training in how to use chemicals to achieve specific effects, from the creation of a superpotent string of “crystal blue” methamphetamine to the improvisation of bombs and poisons that he can use to terrorize or destroy anyone who dares stand between him and the fortune he’s trying to amass. He says he’s doing it for his family—to make sure they’re taken care of should the cancer treatment fail—but though Walt’s love of his wife and kids seems genuine even when he’s at his most domineering and repugnant, there’s never much doubt that his altruistic stance is entirely self-serving.
Much was written throughout the show’s run about Walt as a wish-fulfillment fantasy for generations of middle-aged, married white men, and there is a sense in which it does feel like a fantasy/nightmare of the American patriarchy in decline—a strangely fitting companion to AMC’s other great drama, the 1960s period piece Mad Men, which shows where, on the American time line, that decline began. But the whole thing gains a parablelike dimension, thanks to Gilligan’s heightened sense of stylization, which draws on the funny-sentimental-grotesque sensibility of the Coen brothers (Fargo, No Country for Old Men), but ultimately owes much of its personality to its merger of the crime thriller and the science-fiction horror film. As Breaking Bad unfolds and Walt becomes increasingly bold, brutal, and self-regarding, we start to wonder if what we’re seeing is the story of a man transforming into a monster who might not otherwise have existed or that of a monster nestled for decades very deep inside of a man, and waiting to be activated by the right combination of circumstances: say, a cancer diagnosis; a new baby; a financial crunch; the opportunity to learn about the drug trade from Hank; and access to a former student who is already cooking crystal meth.
Gilligan’s last major series before Breaking Bad was The X-Files, on which he served as a writer, director, and producer, and there are points when this solo outing traffics in familiar imagery from science fiction. As the show itself reminds us, New Mexico is where the United States tested atomic bombs. Many sci-fi movies from the Cold War era concerned monsters created in the desert by atomic testing, or by secret government skulduggery that was ultimately a stand-in for atomic testing. Through the metaphorical prestidigitation of this genre, the monster birthed by radiation is the United States itself, a nation that had plenty of experience with genocide already by way of the Native Americans (some of whom were exterminated in New Mexico), and that remains the only nation ever to use the bomb against civilians. The sci-fi echoes are graphical, too: Walter and many other bald men in the show’s main cast are often lit and framed so that they evoke the mutants of Beneath the Planet of the Apes, the steel-hearted drones of THX 1138, or the bug-eyed aliens of 1950s drive-in flicks. The numerous scenes of Walt and Jesse cooking in the Winnebago or in Gus’s red-floored, high-ceilinged meth lab channel David Cronenberg’s body-horror movies (The Fly, Dead Ringers), particularly when the bodies of enemies are dissolved in tubs or bathtubs filled with acid or when the duo spends a whole episode chasing a fly they believe is contaminating their cook.
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