Why NBC Didn't Cancel Cheers When The Show Was Dead Last In The Ratings
"Cheers" won 28 Emmy awards during its run on NBC, but the Boston-set sitcom almost didn't survive its first year.
Series star Ted Danson has said that the show was on thin ice early on due to terrible ratings. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Danson recalled that during its first season in 1982, creator James Burrows liked to joke that the show was ranked 75th out of 70 series on the air. Self-deprecating jokes aside, "Cheers" actually finished 74th out of 96 shows that year, and Danson told EW that were it not for the fact that NBC "had nothing to replace 'Cheers' with" it would have been dropped after Season 1. The network decided to stick with Sam and friends, and by Season 2, the comedy had climbed to 34th in the rankings.
In 1984 "Cheers" joined "Family Ties," "The Cosby Show," Night Court," and "Hill Street Blues" in NBC's Thursday night lineup; the series also finished in the Top 10 for eight of its 11 seasons. The series finale was seen by an estimated 93 million people. At the time, it was the biggest audience for any TV episode other than the epic "M*A*S*H" finale that had aired a decade before.
Cheers lived on through several other series
If "Cheers" had indeed been cancelled after Season 1, we would have been denied a beloved Emmy favorite... and a couple of flops. The most successful show to come from "Cheers" is "Frasier," which followed bar regular Dr. Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer) after he moved to Seattle to host a radio call-in advice show. "Frasier" took home 38 Emmy awards in its initial 11-season run from 1993 through 2004, but the 2023 revival that followed Dr. Crane back to Boston only lasted 20 episodes before Paramount+ canceled it.
"The Tortellis" — which centered on Nick Tortelli (played by Dan Hedaya), the ex-husband of Carla (Rhea Perlman) — also struggled like "Cheers" in Year 1, but was dropped after its first season. Meanwhile, "Wings" wasn't a direct descendant of "Cheers," but over its eight seasons many familiar barflies passed through the Sandpiper Air terminal including Frasier, his wife Lilith (Bebe Neuwirth), Norm Peterson (George Wendt), and Cliff Clavin (John Ratzenberger).