Ted Danson Tried to Convince Producers Not to Cast This ‘Cheers’ Star
A big reason why Cheers became such a massive hit with ‘80s audiences — apart from giving viewers the vicarious thrill of hanging out in a windowless bar for 22 minutes — was the Sam and Diane relationship. The will-they-won’t-they romance between a former Boston Red Sox relief pitcher and an overly pretentious grad student became the stuff of TV comedy gold.
And a big reason why the offbeat pairing worked so well was the lightning-in-a-bottle chemistry between Ted Danson and Shelley Long. Not every pairing of actors could sell both earnest love scenes and episodes that required going full Three Stooges on one another.
But Long never would have been cast in the role had Danson gotten his way. On a recent episode of Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast, the Becker star hosted guest Andy Richter and, at one point, the two discussed the process of collaborating on comedy shows. Danson admitted that his suggestions to Cheers’ creative team were largely ignored. And, often, producers succeeded by making decisions that were specifically contrary to Danson’s advice.
“I had the reputation on Cheers if I suggested something… This is not self-deprecating humor or false humility, I was dead wrong,” Danson explained. “And if they did the opposite, it would work brilliantly.”
One example of the show’s producers giving Danson’s ideas the George Costanza “opposite” treatment involved the casting of the Diane Chambers part. “One of my first obvious ones was Cheers casting Shelley Long,” he recalled. “And I’m going, ‘Oh, no, not Shelley. No, no, no. That’s all wrong. She’d be terrible for that.’ And she, you know, right out of the shoot, she became this instant brilliant character actor doing a brilliant job. And it was like, ‘Oops.’”
Last year, Danson similarly confessed to the Smartless podcast hosts that his initial reaction to Long’s audition was that hiring her would be a “bad, bad idea.” And even after she was cast, their working relationship wasn’t exactly a smooth one. In a 1992 interview, Long said of Danson, “We never fought. Maybe we should have. I mean, he got angry once, pretty late in the game about something that I wish he had told me about long before, because I made every effort to change it. And I think I did a pretty good job, although maybe it wasn’t good enough for him.”
But now Danson clearly realizes that no one else could have played that role, and attributes their on-screen success to real personal tension. “It sounds like I’m discounting all the other office actors, but that first year she put us on the map,” Danson told Richter. “I loved working with her because, it was like, we are so different. Totally different human beings. (So) when the audience came in, it was like a fistfight — in a good way. Because acting is kind of pushing each other, energetically, around.”
Thankfully, he didn’t try this same approach when his co-star was a literal infant.
