by Warren Littlefield, Former NBC President of Entertainment
I like people who’ve done stage before. You have to be able to play with the other actors and yet play for an audience. Everybody on Cheers had been onstage. Occasionally, you get a film actor, but you try to tell them to get on the level of the person opposite. If you underplay on TV comedy, you’re dead.
Warren: In the pilot of Cheers the Charles brothers ended up adding a character called Mrs. Littlefield, a highly opinionated Boston Brahmin in a wheelchair, who was played by Elaine Stritch. I was honored that they used my last name. Sadly, while she was memorably funny, she was cut because the pilot was just too long. Many years later I got a copy of the rough cut with Elaine still in it and sent it to my mother for Mother’s Day—way better than flowers.
Bob Broder: There was one other character in the show that never got any billing, and that was the set. Richard Sylbert designed the set. He’d won Academy Awards for art direction, most recently for Reds.
Jimmy Burrows directed one feature film called Partners. It was the best thing to happen to television. He hated the experience and said, “Don’t ever show me another feature script.” Jimmy had worked with Sylbert on Partners. Sylbert said he’d love to design the set, but he had to get a royalty. For the set! We gave him $250 per episode. When Michael Eisner found out, years later, that a set designer was getting a royalty, he went ballistic.
Jim Burrows: There are great nights when you run a show in front of an audience before there’s anything at stake. Before there’s film in the camera. A guy named Dave Davis, who started at Newhart, suggested an audience run-through, and I’ve done it on every show.
Cheers was a religious experience. For the pilot run-through, we had an entire audience of Seabees from Camp Pendleton. We were sweating bullets because there’s a lot of sophistication in the show. But when Norm walked in and Sam said, “What do you know?” and Norm said, “Not enough.” Never written as a joke, but the audience went crazy. They were laughing at attitudes.
Warren: I was asked to stay with the show by my bosses at the network and supervise it as it began its network run. It was the best education I could ever have had. My personal master’s degree in comedy from the Charles brothers and Jimmy.
I had just begun to cut my teeth at NBC serving as the current executive on Steven Bochco’s revolutionary drama Hill Street Blues. The show had been developed in NBC’s comedy department, inspired by a Fred Silverman idea with a distinct comedy pedigree. “Why not,” Fred had asked, “Barney Miller as an hour?” Fred’s pitch was passed along to Bochco and Michael Kozoll, and Hill Street was born.
I started out as the junior member of the development team for Hill Street, but once the series got up and running, I was told to stay with the show, making me the current executive. While a development executive has to come up with the hits, my duty as the current executive on Hill Street was to keep the material on track and the episodes up to the standard that was established in the pilot.
Brian Pike: A current executive doesn’t design next year’s Fords. He just makes sure they come off the assembly line the right way. He’s a brand manager. Every week he makes sure those shows have the proper vitamins and minerals, what the network thought it bought.
It’s a completely unrewarding job. You didn’t develop the show, and the people who developed the show take the credit.
Warren: My more seasoned colleagues at NBC had declined to take on the job on Hill Street. They were aware of Steven Bochco’s fierce reputation. He had a quick temper and no patience for suits like us. So they knew better than to stick with the show, but I accepted the challenge in the spirit of learning as much as I could from whoever would teach me.
On Hill Street, I set about asking the traditional questions network executives ask when they read a script. What’s the central story? Does it have a dramatic act-by-act build? Is there a sympathetic victim? Do we care about our central characters? Are they heroic?
Steven Bochco, as I was soon to learn, considered me a colossal pain in the ass.
Bochco told his boss at MTM Enterprises, Grant Tinker, that he wanted a meeting at the network. The purpose was to let NBC clarify what the network had in mind for his series and to let Bochco tell me, in front of my bosses, where I could shove my notes.
Looking back, it was a miracle I survived the meeting. I was way out of my league, but an interesting thing happened. While Grant Tinker was thoroughly supportive of Bochco, he and Brandon realized a guy had been put in the line of fire who wouldn’t run away. Perhaps it was from the summer I worked with French-Canadian ex-cons who threatened to throw me from the roof of a high-rise or maybe the teamsters I trucked with in Paterson, New Jersey, but I wasn’t afraid. I think they admired my unwillingness to budge because, at some level, they were just as leery of Bochco’s wrath as everybody else.
In the course of the meeting, Brandon was wonderfully diplomatic in his praise of Hill Street, but he added that, as network executives writing the checks, we were trained to look for basic dramatic elements in every hour. If they were lacking, it was our job to raise warning flags, and that’s what I’d done. Brandon suggested to Bochco that perhaps it was necessary to help the audience along as it went from a diet of Quincy and CHiPs into the brave new world of Hill Street.
Steven nodded, I recall. Point taken. From then on, Steven had a new level of respect for what I did and what I had to say. Of course, he still reamed me from time to time when the mood hit, but that was just Bochco. It was always worth it because Hill Street supplied me a hell of an education.
There were no such creative fireworks with Cheers. The show premiered on September 30, 1982. We loved it at the network. It was just what we’d hoped it would be, but the ratings were abominable. At the end of its first season, Cheers was the least watched show on prime-time network television. The chances looked good the show wouldn’t have a second season, much less an eleventh.
In 1981, Grant Tinker had replaced Fred Silverman as CEO of NBC. By then, I was in charge of current comedy at the network. My first conversation with Grant began with him calling me into his office and asking me if I owned “a good heavy winter coat.” Why? “I’ve watched the comedies on this network, and it’s going to be a long cold winter for you!”
Grant’s programming philosophy was simplicity itself. We were instructed and encouraged to make shows we’d run home and watch. At the end of Cheers’ first season, when Brandon and I were agonizing over whether or not to cancel the show, Grant asked us a question: “Do you have anything better?” We didn’t. We didn’t have much that was half as good, so we stuck with Cheers, and our faith in the show (and in our taste) was rewarded. The audience found Cheers in summer reruns. We realized that a quality adult comedy audience had no reason to come to our network. Attracting those viewers would take time.
Jim Burrows: Nobody was watching the show when it first went on. There was no reason for the public to watch the show. No star in it. And nobody was watching NBC generally. The press loved us, and the guys at the network loved the show. Our first summer, we got all the way up to ninth. Everybody had seen Simon & Simon and Magnum, but nobody had seen us.
Warren: The Frasier Crane character was added in the third season of Cheers in the person of Kelsey Grammer. Kelsey would end up playing Frasier Crane for twenty years on network television, which hardly seemed likely in the beginning. Kelsey had been hired for four episodes. He’d driven out from New York and for a time was living in his car on the Paramount lot.
Jim Burrows: Frasier was a device to get Diane back in the bar in year three. She’d gone off with the artist, with Chris Lloyd, and had freaked out. She ended up in an institute, and her doctor was Frasier Crane. We offered the part to John Lithgow, but he turned us down.
John Lithgow: I just said, “No, I don’t want to do Frasier.” So they went out and found Kelsey Grammer for it. I barely even remembered that. It was like swatting a fly away. At that time, I just wasn’t going to do a series.
Kelsey Grammer: I was doing
Sunday in the Park with George with Mandy Patinkin. He had lunch with the casting director for Paramount, and she asked him if he knew of any funny leading men. He said, “Yeah, Kelsey Grammer. I’m working with him.”
She called me in for Brothers, one of the first cable sitcoms. I read for the part, didn’t get it, and she called me in for another part. She said it was very hush-hush. I got the sides, and I was reading for a character called Frasier Nye.
When I read it, I thought, “I can play this. I can get this part.”
Jim Burrows: We started to see people, and we got a tape from New York with four actors. Up came Kelsey’s face, and we all started laughing when we saw him.
Kelsey Grammer: I was told I’d be put on tape in a personality piece. This was something I’d never heard of. I went home and found a pair of yellow pants my mother had given me. I’d never worn them. They were Christian Dior, and I thought, “This is just what Frasier Nye would wear.”
I went over to the Gulf & Western building in my yellow pants. I read the sides. I talked about who I was and where I was from. Burrows tells the story that they all saw this tape and started laughing. I don’t know if that was a compliment or not. I thought I looked rather dashing in my yellow pants.
Jim Burrows: He was supposed to do four episodes. He played a pompous asshole, and when Diane left the show, Kelsey could do all the Diane jokes.
Kelsey Grammer: I remember saying, “Nye doesn’t sound quite right to me,” and they came up with Crane.
Warren: Writing for Kelsey’s Frasier Crane required not just an ear for pomposity but a talent for witty, rapid-fire dialogue. The Charles brothers turned to Peter Casey and David Lee, who had impressed them with a Cheers script the pair had submitted on spec.
Peter Casey: We were working on The Jeffersons, and David and I would meet on the weekends or go into the office two or three hours before everyone else would arrive, and we’d work on a Cheers script. We’d read every episode from the first season and had studied the characters.
David Lee: We were producing The Jeffersons at the time, and we saw that the show was coming to an end. We also realized The Jeffersons wasn’t in our DNA. We could execute it, but it wasn’t what we aspired to. We tried to get hired on Family Ties, but Gary David Goldberg said he wouldn’t read a spec Jeffersons script. So we said, “Uh-oh.”
I went to the University of Redlands, where Glen and Les Charles also went, and the university had a TV seminar. We were invited, but Glen and Les were the big draw. We hit it off out there, and I remember the car drive on the way home. I said, “We have to write a spec Cheers.”
Peter Casey: I had a little Honda Prelude we’d squeezed into, and we looked over to see Glen and Les getting into a stretch limo. I said, “Yes, I think we ought to write a Cheers.”
David Lee: I was an actor, and I took a job in my downtime at a copy company. That was in the olden times, before Xerox. TV shows would send out their rewritten scripts every night to a company that typed them and mimeographed them. These days it’s like being a blacksmith.
I was a proofreader and Peter was a typist. I’d never thought about writing, but I somehow convinced Peter that my expertise as an actor and my master’s degree as a director would have some effect.
We had one of those “meteoric” rises—eleven spec scripts and three and a half years before we got our first meeting.
Peter Casey: We started writing hour dramas, but we kept putting jokes in them, so we decided to write sitcoms. We finally wrote a Barney Miller that the people at The Jeffersons read and liked. We brought in five ideas, and they bought one of them.
I was selling sandwiches for A Moveable Feast. I have a picture of me selling a sandwich to Stephen Collins during the filming of Star Trek. It was another six months before The Jeffersons called us and had us write another script.
David Lee: The Jeffersons was a great training ground. It was a good starter education. When we moved over to Cheers, we realized we’d only completed kindergarten.
Peter Casey: We wrote that first episode with a generic psychiatrist in mind.
David Lee: Les and Glen Charles wanted our take on who Frasier was.
Peter Casey: They ended up using a speech of ours in the casting process for Frasier.
Kelsey Grammer: I got called out to L.A. to read and meet people. I met Ted and Shelley, and Jimmy in his office. We read through the scenes once there, and then we went down to a table with twenty or thirty people above stage 25. We read through the scenes again, and there weren’t many laughs. As I turned and left, I said, “Thank you. I’ll go out on the street and see if I can get any laughs there.”
I called my friend Lois, and I said, “Let’s go to San Diego. I have a rental car, and I don’t think I got this job.”
On Monday night I got back to the Holiday Inn on Vine and Hollywood Boulevard, and I found a green box on the table when I walked into my hotel room. Inside was a bottle of Dom, and on a little card it said, “Welcome to Cheers.”
Warren: Kelsey was one of several actors we saw at the network. It came down to Kelsey or John Bedford Lloyd, a handsome, leading-man type, who consistently works in film and television. Jimmy Burrows and the Charles brothers said of Kelsey, “This is the guy we want.” We’d trusted Jimmy and Glen and Les with Ted Danson over Fred Dryer, so we trusted them again. Early on, it became clear to us that Kelsey was perfect for the part. The precision with which he could deliver his lines was like the creative blending of a surgeon and a concert pianist.
Jim Burrows: Our show was the most sophisticated comedy on television—with Kelsey and Bebe. They were playing Noël Coward. It was better than movies. I remember an executive said to me, “You can’t do Schopenhauer jokes.” But Schopenhauer was getting big laughs.
Warren: Kelsey, however, handled his success as Frasier Crane rather poorly. Things didn’t go Charlie Sheen sideways, but they were certainly bad enough.
Jim Burrows: Kelsey came out from New York, and he had a six-month-old baby and was getting divorced. He had a horrible family history.
Peter Casey: It’s just brutal, hard to believe that kind of tragedy has fallen on one person’s shoulders.
Warren: Kelsey’s father and sister were murdered in separate incidents. His twin half brothers died in a scuba-diving accident.
Peter Casey: Kelsey also had a terrible circle of friends. He was the sort of guy who could be driving up the Pacific Coast Highway and pick up a hitchhiker. He’d invite him home. The next thing you know, “Here’s my assistant, Hacksaw.”
David Lee: Or he’d see a stripper in a club and marry her.
Peter Casey: Kelsey would come in after an incredibly rough night, and his performances weren’t good. It came to a head with John Ratzenberger. They had to be separated. Ratzenberger was getting fed up with Kelsey missing his lines and missing his marks.
David Lee: Kelsey was so smart and so talented that he could perform at a certain level when he was drunk or stoned. He was delivering everything you needed. But then his performance started falling below acceptable levels. When we were editing the show, it got to the point where we were having trouble cutting around Kelsey’s performances. They were … enhanced.
Peter Casey: An intervention was called in Les and Glen’s office. Everybody was there. Kelsey walked in, and he said, “What’s going on?” The interventionist explained what was happening.
David Lee: Kelsey said, “Oh, okay,” and it was over quickly. We found out later that part of what makes interventions successful is when everybody goes around the room and tells how they’ve been affected by the person’s behavior. That didn’t happen, and that intervention didn’t take.
Peter Casey: He went to a facility here in town, and David Angell and I went down to visit him. There was Hacksaw or one of his minions sitting in the room with him. I remember thinking, “I don’t know if this is going to work.” It didn’t. The next one worked.
Kelsey Grammer: There were issues I had to deal with. I pro
bably had some anger going on, feeling that my family should still be alive to enjoy this part of my life. I just had to work that out.
Warren: The second intervention, this one during the Frasier years, was held in Kelsey’s house. Stupidly, we at the network had given Kelsey a Dodge Viper that he had flipped over and wrecked, a sure sign of trouble. I later learned that he’d been under the influence of alcohol and cocaine. The night of the intervention I remember going into Kelsey’s kitchen to tell all the hangers-on, “Get out. The party’s over.” Somehow Kelsey couldn’t believe he was worthy of his success. We spent a number of hours trying to convince him he was wrong.
As Cheers continued to thrive, the Charles brothers began pulling back from their day-to-day involvement. They were intent upon handing the reins to Peter Casey and David Lee. Les and Glen would still set up the goals for the season. The Charles brothers always had a great articulation for where the season would start and where it would end. They had character arcs for the core characters. This was a revelation to me. I’d never seen that at the network with any other show.
Peter Casey: For us, it was a very new concept. On The Jeffersons, we had twenty-four episodes, and they were twenty-four individual, stand-alone stories. The Charles brothers would say, “Here’s the way we’re going to tilt the season. First we had Sam chasing Diane, now Diane will get the hots for Sam. That’ll be the arc.” Then Frasier came in, so we had a triangle.
I think we spent the first year and a half learning at the feet of the Charles brothers, and then they handed the show over to us. When you’re the show runner, you’re the person who has the yes/no on the stories. You run the rewrite room. Do the casting. Supervise the editing. Les and Glen would come in a couple of times a month at most.