Three cheers - TV situation comedy 'Cheers' never tried to raise viewer consciousness

National Review, June 7, 1993 by Rob Long

On Thursday, May 20, Cheers will have broadcast its final episode. It may or not be the most highly rated television event in history (as of this writing, that honor belongs to M*A*S*H), but if the broadcast fails to lure every living creature to sit and watch, it won't have been for lack of publicity.

Retrospectives of the series appeared in over fifty daily newspapers. TV Guide and Life have run gushing cover stories. Not to mention Time, Newsweek, and People. NBC has hyped the final episode on Today, Dateline NBC, and an entire episode of The Tonight Show. The last show is preceded by a half-hour documentary, and followed in some areas by live local news broadcasts from local bars, where patrons sipped beer and discussed the series.

And why not a little hype? After all, Cheers was on the air for 11 years, for a total of 275 episodes. For 7 of those years, it ranked in the Neilsen Top Ten. The show won a sackful of Emmys, and remains one of the most popular American television exports around the world. And yet, for conservatives, Cheers is distinguished by an even higher honor: in all of its 11 years, not once - never, ever - did the show attempt to uplift, edify, educate, or raise the consciousness of its audience.

Odd though it seems, that trait alone marks Cheers as a conservative sitcom - the only such one. Long before the Quayle-Brown Wars, television characters were forever encountering decent, sober homeless people who, if not for Ronald Reagan, would be hard at work building orphanages; or the whole gang would learn a valuable lesson from a white male heterosexual AIDS patient who didn't wear a condom because he couldn't get one from his eighth-grade teacher.

The trouble began - of course - in the 1960s. Around that time, intellectuals began to refer to "the media" when they really meant one medium in particular, television. By adding the prefix "mass" they rendered the whole enterprise somehow academically respectable, in a sexy, Marxist sort of way. The mass media, they declared, were an immensely powerful force in American life, and had the power to change the world. In many ways, they were right: CNN and satellite news services did indeed change the world. The same cannot be said of The Cosby Show.

Or Cheers. And that's just fine. We operated under a very simple, and profitable, premise: the American television audience is more or less like us, has roughly the same sense of humor as we do, is as intelligent as we are, works hard during the day, and at night turns on the television for a few laughs. For education, Americalis read a book. For spiritual uplift, they go to church. But for pure entertainment, they come to us. Grasp that, and there's a $2-million house in Maliku with your name on the mailbox. As Lionel Chetwynd, the film director, has pointed out, the irony is that the generation raised on the sanitized, family-values-laden sitcoms of the 1950s grew up to take LSD and riot in the streets; whereas the generation that grew up with the Maoist sitcoms of Norman Lear voted twice for Ronald Reagan and once for George Bush. So much for the transforming power of television sitcoms.

In fact, for sheer political incorrectness, Cheers lists an astonishing number of crimes: we treated alcohol and alcohol dependency in a cavalier, thoughtless fashion; we tried at least once per episode to depict our lead character, Sam Malone, gleefully objectifying women; through the character of Frasier Crane, we impugned the entire psychiatric profession; Rebecca was a paper tiger of a career woman who really just wanted a husband. Thinking back, I'd say it's a wonder the network broadcast the show at all. But they had no choice. It was too damn popular.

Meanwhile, though, everyone else on television was trying to get America worked up about the greenhouse effect, or some other liberal claptrap. Many of the actors on our show were active in left-wing political causes. Some, like Ted Danson, became very public spokesmen for their pet causes (in Danson's case, the environmental movement).

Yet give them credit: not once did they impose or impress their political beliefs on the characters they portrayed, and they never asked for a script or storyline with which to spread the gospel of their favorite cause. The actors, too, knew the secret of the show: respect the audience. Using an essentially trivial format to convert the audience to a particular political view is not only condescending and arrogant, it's also impossible to do and still be funny. Exhibit A is the fate of Designing Women, arguably the most liberal show on television, and the most insufferably didactic. Check the ratings. The final episode of Designing Women will come and go without so much as a ripple on the PR radar screen.

Cheers, which ran from 1981 to 1993, owes its success to the Reagan Doctrine, which itself first appeared in 1981. This Doctrine states that the American people are not stupid. They are not philistines. They do not need to be coddled or educated or sensitized by the cultural elite. They need to be entertained. Sing, dance, tell a joke, or shut up and get off the stage.