An oral history of Cheers

Amy Poehler says it’s the best show on television and GQ has a long oral history of Cheers.

On The Jeffersons, you would give your notes to the director, and he’d go, “Right, right,” and then turn around and go to the actors and say, “Oh, those fucking writers. They want to change this.” And then the director would come back [to the writers] and go, “Oh, those actors. They won’t do a thing I ask them.” You get this weird us-against-them [mentality].

And when we got to Cheers, everybody could talk to everybody. Now, granted, if you were smart you had a sense of where you were on the totem pole, you watched your comments and obviously deferred to the bosses. But if I saw something that Shelley had done that I thought was particularly good, or if a writer had a suggestion for a way she might be able to do it better, you got to tell her that. The only rule was you had to do it so everybody could hear; there were no private conversations. It had to be open with everybody. It really fostered this feeling that we were all in it together.

I watched Cheers all the time when I was a kid…I’ve seen each episode at least twice. For me, it was the best show until Seinfeld came along. Haven’t seen an episode for probably 15 years though. I wonder if it holds up as well as Poehler claims.

• Amy Poehler
• Cheers
• oral history
• TV