Cheers Television Views
Cheers is an American situation comedy television series that ran for eleven seasons from 1982 to 1993. It was produced by Charles/Burrows/Charles Productions, in association with Paramount Network Television for NBC, and was created by the team of James Burrows, Glen Charles, and Les Charles. The show is set in the Cheers bar (named for the toast Cheers ) in Boston, Massachusetts, where a group of locals meet to drink, relax, chat and have fun. The show's theme song, written and performed by Gary Portnoy, and co-written with Judy Hart Angelo, lent its famous refrain, Where Everybody Knows Your Name , as the show's tagline.[1]
After premiering on September 30, 1982, it was nearly canceled during its first season when it ranked last in ratings for its premiere (77th out of 77 shows).[2] Cheers, however, eventually became a highly rated television show in the United States, earning a top-ten rating during eight of its eleven seasons, including one season at #1. The show spent most of its run on NBC's Must See Thursday lineup. Its widely watched series finale was broadcast on May 20, 1993. The show's 270 episodes have been successfully syndicated worldwide, and have earned 28 Emmy Awards from a then-record 117 nominations. The character Frasier Crane, played by Kelsey Grammer, was featured in his own successful spin-off, Frasier, which also ran for eleven seasons and included guest appearances by all of the major, and some minor, Cheers characters. The only exceptions to this were Kirstie Alley and the deceased Nicholas Colasanto.
NBC dedicated a whole night to the final episode of Cheers, following the one-hour season finale of Seinfeld (which was its lead-in). The show began with a pregame show hosted by Bob Costas, followed by the final 98-minute episode itself. NBC affiliates then aired tributes to Cheers during their local newscasts, and the night concluded with a special Tonight Show broadcast live from the Bull & Finch Pub. Although the episode fell short of its hyped ratings predictions to become the most-watched television episode, it was the most watched show that year, bringing in 80.4 million viewers[26] (64 percent of all viewers that night), and ranked 11th all time in entertainment programming.
The episode originally aired in the usual Cheers spot of Thursday night, and was then rebroadcast on Sunday. Some estimate that while the original broadcast did not outperform the M*A*S*H finale, the combined non-repeating audiences for the Thursday and Sunday showings did. Toasting Cheers also notes that television had greatly changed between the M*A*S*H and Cheers finales, leaving Cheers with a broader array of competition for ratings.[2]
Cheers Television Images
