So, I've decided to check out Cheers AND Frasier...

From what I remember, Cheers doesn't really hit the stratosphere until Woody's entrance & the Kirstie Alley years. I imagine that the "will they/won't they" Diane years might be a terribly labored slog but I'm sure that there's still alot of gold there, particularly with the introduction of Lilith later on.

 

Now, Frasier? Ugh...I say skip dat honky shizz & sink your teeth into Night Court. Now THAT is a show worth digging up & investigating.

I'm the exact opposite.  I think the Diane years are the better run.  Not that it ever had a bad run, I just responded to the Sam/Diane/Coach years more than the Rebecca years.  

 

Frasier always bugged me, because it was a very well-conceived, intelligently written show with great performances, but my God, the writers never met a punchline they couldn't drive into the ground. Practically every other joke on Frasier feels like it's delivered by Fozzie Bear. "Get it? Get it? Wocka wocka wocka!"

Same, Woody was great, but Coach was something else entirely, Woody was just his shadow...

 

 

 

Those early years hold up pretty damn well in my estimation. They still play them on late night TV and I find myself sitting through whole eps and still giggling. There's a reason "Sam and Diane" become a TV byword in the eighties.

Coach was so, so great. The AV Club is going through season 1 of Cheers right now if interested, and it's inspiring me to rewatch it.

 

I enjoyed the early years of Frasier, then stopped watching and forgot it was even on. Eleven seasons! I saw maybe a quarter of it, and that was more than enough.

 

 

Diane > Rebecca

 

Coach < Woody

Coach ftw then, I guess.

 

Personally, I always thought that Vera was the best character on the show.

Don't get me wrong, it was a monumental stroke of inspiration and/or good fortune to replace Coach with Woody - Woody was still gold. It was Coachs loveability that drove him over the top.

What a coincidence, I just started watching CHEERS two nights ago. Before that I never really saw it. By the time it ended I was 6 so I only had my share of FRASIER since then. Heck, I actually started with the pilot of FRASIER because I've been eager to rewatch it for a long time. Then I realized mid-way that I should start with CHEERS first so I went back to that.

So far? In the middle of S1 but so far it's good, nothing great though. Only complaint is the 60 second pre-title scenes which have been pretty flat so far and I haven't come across an episode that was as well written as the FRASIER pilot, making me more eager to finish CHEERS just to move onto the spin-off. Still, it's entertaining early 80s sitcom stuff and Ted Danson is perfectly cast. I look forward to when the other regulars arrive in the coming seasons. Shame about Coach, I'm more upset of that than Diane leaving.

Although I'm not a Diane fan, I will say that her final episode, where Sam revealed his desire to grow old with her, was one of the most poignant TV moments of all time.

Frasier was actually pretty damn solid for its first few seasons, but once it became The Niles & Daphne Show, I tuned out.  

A wonderful little AV Club love note to Sam and Diane and just how great that pairing was.

My favorite episode is when Cliff goes on "Jeopardy".  The Alex Tribek stuff at the end is amazing - Alex has a real knack for deadpan, real lightning-in-a-bottle stuff.  If your going to skip ahead, that's the one to go to.  The homophobia episode in season one is waaaaayyyy ahead of it's time and it's easy to see how the show zipped up the ratings.

 

Gotta go with the Wood-man over Coach, but that's kind of a sensitive issue.  Lots of the gags with Woody's dim, rich girlfriend  Kelly are a scream:

 

Woody:  I'm out of money.

Kelly:  Well, we could just stop by an ATM machine.

Woody:  No ... I'm OUT of money.

 

Also liked the Rebekah stuff more, but mostly because the show became less about relationships and more about antics  - some of the plot-lines get very Nickelodeon in later seasons (Especially the Robin Colcord stuff that seems to go for years).  I also love how very realistic, profound  stuff would creep in, like Frasier saying point blank to Sam "I know I'm not one of the most popular regulars at the bar" - good luck hearing someone say something like that on ALF or Family Matters.

 

Frasier is a slog, but some people love it.  It was a very popular television show.

I love Frasier. It's nothing groundbreaking, but it's a consistently entertaining show with a lot of fun performances. It's worth watching even if just for David-Hyde Pierce as Niles.

 

Also, the episode where Derek Jacobi guest stars as a terrible Shakespearian actor is one of my all-time favorites.

For my money, Cheers is the best sitcom ever. Better than All in the Family, The Simpsons, Cosby, Seinfeld, all of the "classic" heavy hitters. And the newer crop like AD, Sunny, etc... aren't even in the same League.

 

I love how the show just turned on a dime after Diane left and made it almost a completely different show (as Wendell mentions above) it became more of an ensemble instead of focusing mostly on Sam and Diane, although Sam was still the main carachter. I do prefer Woody to Coach. But that's not saying Coach was bad or anything. Dude was fucking brilliant. But I liked the sillier stuff. Like Cliff on Jeopardy or having to stage a jeep accident to explaing his burned mail bag because he left it in the bar when Rebecca burned it down, Norm and Cliffs mom on the Tonight Show with Johnny, Lillith entertaining the guests at Woodys wedding and the war with Gary's Old Towne Tavern...so much fun.

 

Fraiser as a carachter was never as good as he was in his own show as he was on Cheers. My favorite bit from him had to be him reading "the classics" to the barflys but interjecting action movie elements into the stories. Like putting an Apache attack Helicopter into a tale of two cities.

 

Not a big Fraiser fan. It had its moments but for the negative, they turned the carachter on a dime and he want from being one of the guys (although still a bit of an outsider). To being more like Fraiser when he first showed up on Cheers with Diane. Just kinda turned me off. David Hyde Pierce was almost always gold though.

 

David Hyde Pierce is comedy gold but, to me, if Cheers were Seinfeld, Frasier would be Everybody Loves Raymond.

Spoiler alert, Chris:

 

 

Warning: Spoiler! (Click to show)

 

Same here. The whole point of Frasier on Cheers was the joy of watching this cultured erudite become corrupted by the bar. Putting him back on his "turf" zapped all the fun out of the character. But that doesn't diminish Grammer's work on Cheers. Never failed to make me laugh. For example:

 

  I prefer Rebecca to Diane. Diane was more of a one joke character. She was just a bit of a snob. Where as Rebbecca was a complete train wreck underneath her cold get ahead in business exterior. Chris here are three great episodes to check out:  the one where Sam and Henri have a contest to see who can get more women's phone numbers, Woody and Kelly's Wedding, and the one where Elvis, via the TV, tells Sam Rebecca would make a great mother for his child.

 

  Its been a long time since I watched the show, but I was a big fan back in the day.

 

 

 

It's been a while but I remember that the "Thanksgiving at Norm's House" episode (from the Diane era, I think) was one of the series' highest points.

An episode I love is the one where Cliff has a guy rig him up with an electronic gadget and give him a shock everytime he's annoying. After being shocked all night he takes the remote away from the man, and pointing it at him and repeatingly pushing the button yells with total exasperation "How do you like it?" even though he's still just shocking himself.

Stone cold classic.  

That episode is brilliant. Simultaneously hilarious, biting and heart-breaking.

I'm definitely of the view that the Diane years are where it's at with Cheers. Not that it was bad after that, but it was more of a conventional sitcom, whereas the early stuff often feels like you're watching a really witty stageplay or something. But I do prefer Woody to Coach, he tended to get the more interesting stories and brought a bit of youthful energy that wasn't quite there before.

 

I've got plenty of time for Frasier as well but never followed it as faithfully. The impression I get is that it could've done with it's own 'Rebecca' - something to shake up the format and stop it getting stale.

I haven't seen an episode of Cheers since some of you have been born, but I still remember little bits of business like Woody's song: "Kelly Kelly Kelly Kelly K-E-L-L-Y..."

 

Or Sam daydreaming about going to the electric chair for killing Diane:

 

"Massachusetts doesn't have the death penalty."

"...we don't...?"

 

Although I always think of it as part of one huge Thursday-night sitcom: Cosby Family Ties Cheers Night Court.

Y'know I don't know if it's the fact the humour didn't travel all that well, but I just never found Cheers to be all that. Thou UK TV didn't exactly promote the thing all that much back in the day. But by the time i hit my teens and perhaps could get the jokes more, the Simpsons had already landed and everything else seemed almost jurassic in comparison...

 

Frasier  was really funny for the first few seasons, before stagnating something fierce. I do still love the Lisa Edelstein episode thou, if only for the howling ending....

 

 

So many great performances in Cheers, but I think Danson's was the most underrated. Nowadays, just when CSI was about to join its Miami and NY bretheren in my big circular file, it's Danson who pulled me back in.

Any of the Gary's Old Town Tavern episodes are gold, but I have a fondness for when Harry Anderson would pop up as Harry the Hat.

 

I just like to pretend that it was his character from Night Court visiting Boston under an alias in order to pull cons.

 

(And I just remembered that the final season of Cheers had an episode with both the Old Town Tavern and Harry that had a pretty awesome ending.)

I've been watching Cheers nonstop on Netflix. Great to have on in the background while I'm working. I forgot how good this show was. 

 

Not ready for Frasier yet, the 90s are still too fresh in my mind to give it ago. Need to let it mature a while longer.

 

That two hour block of television (Cosby, Family Ties, Cheers, Night Court) can be considered proof that god exists and hates everyone born after the mid 80s.

That's the gospel truth, right there. In my house growing up, Thursday night on NBC was church. And it was actually a 3 hour block of magic with Hill Street Blues & later LA Law at the tail end. Then, of course, you had muthafuckin' Carson & Letterman back to back in the late night spot.

 

All because of this guy.

"Do you believe in the afterlife father?"

"Yes"

"Good. Then I can kill her again."

 

Harry showing up as Harry the Hat was always great.  If I remember correctly he started that before Night Court was even on the air, but I always loved that even after Night Court he'd show up to do the character.
 

 

I also liked the episode of St. Elsewhere where a few of the doctors stop by Cheers, thus making Cheers and Frasier part of Tommy Westphal's autistic dream.

 

Not to mention The Tortellis. Raise your hand if you remember that first failed Cheers spin-off. Ah Jesus, the memories: "Loret-ta."

I'm pretty sure I watched the entire very brief run.  Dan Hedaya was actually pretty stellar in that role.  

 

The Tortellis: 22 minutes of Dan Hedaya SCREAMING (with intermittent laugh track).

I think Woody dancing cracks me up the most.

 

 

Wait, whut? There was a Tortellis spin-off? I thought I knew everything about 70s-80s-sitcoms.
 

 

If you blinked, you missed it.  I don't think it even made it to ten episodes.

 

The Wikipedia entry for Tortellis is pretty glorious. 

Wowee! The Tortellis lasted all the way from January to May! That's as long as two Golden Palace's & an AfterMASH! Today's NBC would KILL for that fountain of riches!

I'll go to bat for Frasier.  Consistently one of the better farces around.  And I think Frasier was just as out of his element back home in Seattle as he was in the bar -- he always thought he was in a different element than he actually was.

 

Frasier also contained, for my money, one of the greatest jokes ever to grace a sitcom:

 

The Ropers was so horrible that I suspect that it brought back smallpox, so I'm going with The Tortellis.

 

Whatever happened to spinoffs?  They have seemingly vanished into thin air, at least for sitcoms.  

 

 

 

Correct me if I'm wrong (there's an easy way to check, I just don't feel like it), but wasn't Frasier actually on longer than Cheers?

 

As for spin-offs, I believe Parks & Rec was conceived in its early stages as an Office spin-off. The first season feels like one, too, the general consensus being that it truly came into its own in season 2.

 

I want to say the last sitcom spin-off that had any visibility was Joey, and we know how that turned out. If there've been any others in recent years, they've faded into obscurity (or have eluded my memory).