The bar from the sitcom "Cheers," a refuge for sad characters and a hilarious audience

Half a dozen episodes into NBC's first season of Cheers , the show's creators added a disclaimer before the pre-credits sequence, delivered in turn by the show's leads: " Cheers is being filmed in front of a live studio audience." From its premiere on September 30, 1982, Cheers found itself in a strange place.

A traditional sitcom, this series immediately attracted critical acclaim (but not public acclaim, which remained, in those early days, few in number), including the New York Times , who praised "a cast made up mainly of new faces which already seems on the way to becoming a theatre troupe" . Among the attractions of this pilot was the unlikely appearance of a voluble and pedantic academic in a downtown Boston bar called Cheers. In the time of the first episode, Diane Chambers (Shelley Long) managed to get dumped by her thesis advisor, get hired as a waitress, and drive the owner and manager of the establishment, the handsome, almost handsome, retired baseball player, and sober alcoholic Sam Malone (Ted Danson), crazy (with love, rage, and many other things).

Diane Chambers' exquisite use of the term "pâté de terre" (in French in the text) rather than "potato" and jokes involving literary or philosophical greats must have attracted an audience that was not quite that of ordinary sitcoms, since they complained about the volume of laughter on the soundtrack. To appease the annoying ones (and dispel the ever-present suspicion that the laughter is pre-recorded), brothers Glen and Les Charles and James Burrows, the creators of Cheers , installed this weekly reminder, which would remain in place until the finale, consisting of the ^274th and ^275th episodes, which aired on May 20, 1993, at the end of the eleventh season.

You have 71.3% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.