Top of the Rock: Inside the Rise and Fall of Must See TV

by Warren Littlefield, Former NBC President of Entertainment

Paul Reiser: Then we got tossed out of Thursday. That was the tough part. Wednesday, Monday, every day but Friday. That was hard. Then Warren put us on Sunday afternoon at 4:00. That seemed ill-advised.

  Warren: It played Sunday night at 8:00 in the fall of 1995 until the summer of 1996.

  Helen Hunt: All I remember is it being so horrible for Paul. Each change was like a knife at his throat, and I was blissfully unaware of what each change meant.

  Preston Beckman: At one point, we exiled Mad About You to Saturday night. We just didn’t know what to do with it.

  Paul Reiser: That was a very tough time for me. I knew all I could do was what I could do. It’s a gorgeous painting, and that’s going to look great in our garage. It’s your painting, if you want it in your garage, God bless.

  The show lost its moment of heat when it was moved to Sunday. It was viewed as a lesser show because of the move. The audience never really found us again. We had a long run, and we all did very well, but in the context of what Mad About You was able to do … Somebody has to get moved around, and we were the show that moved around.

  Helen Hunt: Sometimes people ask me, what would be today’s version of Mad About You? I guess it would be Modern Family. People are still not putting the toilet paper on the toilet paper roll, and interrupting each other, and trying to change each other, and unable to change each other, and having trouble getting pregnant, and having parents that make you crazy. So I don’t know that it would be so different.

  It was really in love with love, that show.

  Warren: In the mid-eighties NBC’s St. Elsewhere may not have drawn as many viewers as CBS’s Murder, She Wrote, but the demographics of the St. Elsewhere audience were right in the sweet spot for advertisers—predominantly eighteen- to forty-nine-year-old upscale urban viewers—while the audience for Murder, She Wrote was older and rural. CBS may have had more eyeballs, but we made the money. It was a critical difference between the two networks—one I would embrace. Because of the quality of the show and the nature and size of its audience, Cheers had been minting money for a decade for NBC and Paramount, and now we had to replace it.

  We were determined to salvage what we could from the show. We’d already tried the disastrous Tortellis spin-off and briefly entertained the notion of a show centered on Cliff and Norm. But it soon became evident that the only Cheers character who could conceivably carry a quality show on his own was Kelsey Grammer’s Frasier Crane.

  As incentive, I offered John Pike at Paramount Television thirteen episodes on the air for the new Frasier Crane show. We knew the creators must be Casey, Angell, and Lee, the team that had created the Frasier character for Cheers before going off to create, write, and produce Wings for NBC.

  David Lee: People criticized Wings as Cheers in an airport. If only we could have lived up to that.

  Peter Casey: When you live in the sheltered environment of a hit show like Cheers, all you have to do is come up with stories and keep the thing going—and then we stepped out of it. We had our offices, and that was about it. Everything else we had to come up with.

  We debated if we should create interesting characters and put them in an environment or create an environment and populate it with characters.

  David Lee: One Labor Day, I went to Nantucket, and we landed at this airport. We’d thought about various other airports, even the Grand Canyon.

  Peter Casey: We learned we should have moved the show farther away from Boston.

  David Lee: We picked the model of what we knew and translated it. A public place where anybody could walk in the door. Wings allowed us not to be safe on the following show. The next show would be the show we wanted to do. Wings was like middle school.

  Peter Casey: We learned a lot doing Wings. Everything was in place at Cheers for us, and we could always call the Charles brothers. There was nobody to call with Wings.

  David Lee: We wrote a Wings script, and Tartikoff said no. The mistake we made in the first one was doing scenes that showed who each character was. What we learned was to come up with a great story, and the characters would be revealed in the course of that story. We needed a great through-line.

  Peter Casey: We pitched the show to Brandon, and he said he kept seeing ticket counters and big jets and the backs of people’s heads. We literally had to show him a picture to give Brandon an idea of the sort of airport we were talking about.

  David Lee: Wings was not the Zeitgeist express. We couldn’t cast the female lead. We wrote her as a sultry Greek beauty. We wanted Peri Gilpin.

  Peter Casey: But she wasn’t ready for prime time.

  David Lee: Somebody said, “How about Crystal Bernard?”

  Peter Casey: We read her, and she was a lot better than we’d thought she’d be.

  David Lee: She was supposed to have grown up on Nantucket, but she had that southern accent.

  Peter Casey: We took our first casting trip to New York, and that’s where we found Steven Weber.

  David Lee: Trying to find a handsome, sexy, great actor, funny, and thirty-two years old isn’t easy. And we had to find two of them.

  Peter Casey: Thomas Haden Church came in to read for Brian. We thought he was wrong for the part, but we knew we had to get him in the show. So we created the Lowell character for him. I think he never got over the idea that he came in to read for Brian but he was this Lowell guy.

  We were seven episodes in, and Tom said he wanted to leave the show. We had to get our producer backbones up and tell him he wasn’t leaving.

  David Lee: He left the minute he could. It was never acrimonious, and Tom has done quite well and has the career he wanted.

  Warren: Wings was referred to at the network (on the sly) as Cheers Lite. It was a solid show and performed well for us, but it couldn’t really kick off an hour. It was a satellite show. It needed a lead-in.

  The bar that Glen and Les Charles and Jimmy Burrows first walked in and said, “This is the place,” was the Bull and Finch in Boston. On May 20, 1993, on the last night of Cheers, we took over the Bull and Finch and had a massive celebration of the series that had meant so much to our network. The cast and producers were all there, live feeds went out to all of the stations with interviews and hype. The entire Thursday night was dedicated to Cheers. The Tonight Show hosted live from the bar, and I put on an apron and tended bar, serving Boston legends like Red Sox pitcher Roger Clemens. It was an amazing and emotional event and is still in the top twenty list of highest-rated nights in broadcast television history.

  Reality came crashing in early in the evening when Suzanne Wright, Bob’s wife, greeted my colleague Perry Simon and me with one panicked question: “Where are the hits?” With the new Kelsey Grammer show, we knew we needed a bona fide hit and just not another Wings. Not only was the pressure on me; it was also on John Pike and the writers to deliver one. Only recently have I learned how rocky the birth of Frasier was.

  John Pike: NBC wanted to be in the Casey/Angell/Lee business. They created the Frasier Crane character on Cheers. David Angell was a former priest. David Lee was gay. Peter Casey was straight and white-bread. They were wonderful together. Fortunately, we owned Casey/Angell/Lee.

  Also, NBC smartly said they wanted to be in the Kelsey Grammer business. I had a great relationship with Kelsey because of the things I’d gone through with him for a number of years. The one thing we knew for sure was we weren’t going to do The Frasier Crane Show. Kelsey didn’t want to play the character again, and Casey/Angell/Lee didn’t want to be the spin-off guys.

  Peter Casey: We had always felt if there was any character to spin off that show it was Frasier. The best character. The most depth. The most complicated. Our biggest concern was, “Do we really want to be the guys who try to spin a character off of Cheers?”

  John Pike: Frasier Crane was the only person in the Cheers cast you could pluck out. He had an occupation. He was a psychiatrist. On the series, he was already in a state of flux. You could take that character and put him anywhere in the world.<
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  Peter Casey: Cheers was America’s favorite show. We thought we’d pale by comparison.

  Bob Broder: Now it’s four years into Wings and the end of Cheers. There was a whole ensemble concept on Cheers that worked effectively. Kelsey was fucked-up at the time. We’d spent a year with him in an orange jumpsuit picking up trash on the side of the road.

  Brian Pike: An enormous amount of money and effort went into replacing Cheers. People like Bob Wright had no idea what development was. He thought replacing Cheers was like making next year’s refrigerator. You change the handles, you change the color, and you go to the market.

  Warren: Bob’s full appreciation of how difficult it really was to produce a successful spin-off of a hit show would not come until years later with the Friends spin-off Joey.

  John Pike: I knew I had the actor, the writer-producers, and a time period commitment. Time period in those days was really important.

  Warren: He had thirteen episodes but no time period guarantee. If I learned anything from Seinfeld it was you had to be “master of your domain.”

  Kelsey Grammer: In the eighth year of Cheers, Paramount had approached me about doing another show. When Ted finally said he was done, that’s when I started talking to people. I talked to Casey/Angell/Lee, and they hatched this idea about a guy who’d been in a terrible motorcycle accident and runs his empire from his bed.

  John Pike: We’d have meetings, and then I’d send them away, and the writers would go away for a long time. I don’t know what they’d do, but they’d go away for a long time. I mean it’s a goddamn sitcom. Twenty-two minutes. It’s real easy. Finally, I get a call one day from Peter Casey. They want to come see me. They’ve got an idea.

  It was the worst idea I’d ever heard in my life. They preface it by saying, “Kelsey is totally on board.” There’s a self-made man, very wealthy, arrogant, think Ted Turner when he was young. He’s stricken with an illness and is bedridden. Basically, he runs his empire through his household, and that’s the series.

  Warren: I would call John constantly and ask for a progress report, and his answer was always “We’ve got something great. We’ll lay it out for you in a few weeks.”

  Kelsey Grammer: It was interesting, and I thought some parts of it were funny.

  John Pike: We let it percolate for a couple of days and brought them back. I said, “Guys, this is gold. You’ve got a giant idea here, but I don’t think you have a giant idea that’s going to be commercial. You’ve got great stuff, but I don’t think it’s a home run.” In other words, I lied.

  David Lee: I still think the original pitch would make an interesting cable show. Kelsey was going to play a Malcolm Forbes type of guy. Big motorcycle. Really rich guy. He becomes paralyzed, and the relationship would be between him and his physical therapist. In retrospect, you can see hints of what was to come.

  Peter Casey: Him trying to run his empire from this incredible penthouse in Manhattan. John Pike, when we pitched it to him, said, “I think it’s a better idea to do a spin-off of Frasier.”

  John Pike: The boys said I’d never get Kelsey to do it. I said, “Let me talk to Kelsey.” I remembered when Kelsey used to live on the Paramount lot, lived in his Cadillac. I’d been through a great deal with Kelsey. I’d visited him in jail. We’re close.

  Kelsey Grammer: John Pike invited me to dinner at Toscana in Brentwood. He looked at me and said, “Kelsey, I think a sitcom should be funny. This isn’t funny.” He said, “I do have an idea. Why don’t we go with Frasier?”

  I said, “I get it, but it has to be different. I don’t want to still be married, and there can’t be any kids around.” That was the deal we made at that moment.

  Peter Casey: The whole point of having Frasier move to Seattle was to make it hard for the network to say, “Can we have an episode with Carla?” We only felt we could bring Lilith. That was organic.

  David Lee: I think part of our original deal was no Carla, no George.

  Peter Casey: No visiting crossover stuff. Even the structure of the show—the idea that we didn’t have music in the show, or didn’t show exterior shots, brought the black cards in. That was all purposely designed to make Frasier different from Cheers.

  The cards were in the pilot, designed to alleviate exposition. “The Job.” “The Brother.”

  David Lee: So you don’t need the dialogue “Well, Niles is my brother and …” Our resistance to doing a spin-off served us all well—in our creative process and in the way we approached the piece.

  John Pike: I said, “Either put a dog or a baby in it, and it pops.” So that’s how the dog got on the show.

  Peter Casey: We’d been trying to break a story on Cheers where Frasier had been a guest host on a radio show, but we could never quite get it right. So when we had him move to Seattle, we decided to give him a whole new job. It left him off balance a little. You get fun with Frasier when he’s not quite sure what he’s doing. Then he could become a local celebrity like Sam was a local celebrity in Boston.

  We were thinking of it as a workplace comedy. The key to the whole show was David Lee coming in one day and saying he thought a lot of people were going through what he was going through. David’s father had suffered a stroke, and David is an only child, so he was helping his mother take care of his father. David said people our age are going through this, and Cheers never delved into Frasier’s life in that way, so we had this incredibly fertile field.

  Warren: After countless calls, negotiations, and cajoling, the day finally came when Peter, David, and David came into my office to pitch Frasier. Jesus, it was late in the development season. Could this be pulled off?

  Perry Simon: I had been pushing those guys from my end to create a family show. When they came in for the pitch, Peter Casey said, “You’re not going to believe it. We’re going to give you a family show.” I fell out of my chair onto the floor and prostrated myself. I literally got on my knees and bowed to thank him.

  David Lee: At the pitch meeting, we laid out the story, and the network guys said that sounded great. We said we’d like somebody like John Mahoney. They said if you can get John Mahoney, he’s preapproved. David Hyde Pierce—preapproved. Jane Leeves—preapproved. This was like getting free money.

  Perry Simon: I remember being struck that Frasier was one of the first times I’d ever seen a show where they knew every actor before they pitched the show.

  Lori Openden: Frasier was the most well-crafted show and well-put-together pilot I’ve ever worked on. They wanted John Mahoney. He was living a quiet life in Chicago doing theater, and he had to get talked into it by the producers. He’d done The House of Blue Leaves on Broadway and Moonstruck. He didn’t have to audition.

  We knew David Hyde Pierce. There wasn’t a brother in the original plot of the show. One of the casting directors who was working with the producers brought a picture of DHP to the producers and said, “Look at this guy. He looks just like Kelsey.” He never auditioned either.

  Jane Leeves came in to read. She’d been on Murphy Brown as one of the secretaries. She’d scored in that.

  Peter Casey: Frasier had this perfect life, and then his father moved in and had a home care worker. So you had conflict. Then our casting director walked in and asked, “Are you guys thinking of having a brother on this show?” She showed us a photo of David Hyde Pierce. “Doesn’t he look like Kelsey ten years ago?”

  We had a meeting with David Hyde Pierce. We gave him a basic outline of who the character was, and he said he’d love to do it.

  David Hyde Pierce: When I went in, I knew it was guys who had written on Cheers and Kelsey. I knew his theater work, and I knew what a wonderful actor he was. I also knew John Mahoney’s work onstage.

  All they could tell me was that Frasier was a Freudian and Niles was a Jungian. Frasier had gone to Harvard, and Niles had gone to Yale. I went home and called my agent. I told her it seemed to have gone well, and she said, “It must have gone well because they offered you the part.”<
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  I was stunned and immediately concerned. I thought, “Oh, great, I have a part, but I haven’t seen a script.” The Powers That Be had been a mixed experience for me because I loved it, but for whatever reason it got thrown all over the schedule and then tanked and went away. And I’d been in plays that had closed, so I knew what that was like. So I was quite gun-shy about the whole thing.

  Peter Casey: We decided Niles would be Frasier if Frasier had never walked into Cheers.

  David Hyde Pierce: My character in The Powers That Be had no lines. The script would just say, “Theodore: Mutter mutter.” I had read for Norman Lear in L.A., had read for Peter MacNicol’s role. Norman said, “You’re great but not in this part. Have you ever thought about directing?”

  One of the strengths of Frasier, in the writing and the performance, was that the characters were three-dimensional so you could build on them. That certainly happened with the brothers. On the page, they were in conflict. We both instinctively as actors brought the other side of that as well. I think that’s why the show had such legs, why it was such fun. Frasier and Niles could go at each other hammer and tongs, and yet they still loved each other as brothers.

  Peter Casey: We start writing, and we’re starting the casting process, trying to get everybody. We’re on this deadline, and John Mahoney wanted to meet with us … in Chicago. So we flew to Chicago in February. We had dinner with John. We pitched him. He said it sounded interesting and that we should send him the script once we’d finished.

  Jim Burrows: The only reason John Mahoney played Kelsey’s father was because we had a Cheers episode about a man hired to write jingles for the bar. We hired Ronny Graham for the part. He was crazy. We had the dress rehearsal, broke for dinner, and Ronny drove off the lot and never came back.