Ted Danson has accumulated a lot of impressive TV credits over the years, ranging from Becker to The Good Place to CSI for a dramatic turn. He may always be best remembered for his Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning work as Sam Malone on Cheers, however, and he still has stories to tell about his time on the sitcom that ended more than thirty years before this point in the 2025 TV schedule. He recounted instances when jokes would flop on Cheers, but sometimes for a perfectly straightforward reason.
Cheers, which ran for eleven seasons on NBC from 1982 - 1993, could boast a consistently funny cast made up of Rhea Perlman, the late George Wendt, a very young Woody Harrelson, future Frasier star Kelsey Grammer, and John Ratzenberger, to name just some of Ted Danson's co-stars. Having a stacked cast didn't mean that there weren't sometimes jokes that just didn't land on set, as Danson shared with SNL vet Fred Armisen on the Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast:
This must have happened to you all at Saturday Night Live, where all week long on Cheers, we would rehearse, and there was something that we could barely get through. We would be rolling on the ground. It was so funny. [Later,] the audience comes. Here comes the moment, and you could hear a pin drop. And it's like, instead of being horrified, it's the funniest thing, because your body is all of a sudden plummeting to earth.
There are perks to having a live studio audience during sitcom tapings, with many Night Court guest stars hyping that element of production as one example. Apparently, there are also downsides when it comes to those in-studio audiences not cracking up at the jokes that totally broke the actors. Fortunately, Danson's reveal that the actors could laugh at the silence means that he wasn't recounting a horror story on his own podcast. He went on:
One time a joke died, and [director James Burrows] turned and looked at the audience and said, 'Can you hear it? Are the mics on?' And they went, 'No.' And we turned it on, the joke killed.
Talk about a simple reason for why a joke wasn't landing with audience members! James Burrows was a major part of Cheers as the director of a whopping 243 of the series' 270 episodes as well as a co-creator, so it's only natural that he could connect the dots to microphones as the problem with a somber audience. Technical difficulties weren't always to blame for silence on set, however, as Danson went on to recall:
It was a week later, I decided to go, 'Wait a minute. Can you hear us?' [They responded.] 'Yeah. We can.' … When [Burrows] called it, it was [because the mics were off]. When I called it, it was, 'Oh, no. We hear you loud and clear.'
Well, eleven seasons' worth of jokes can't all rank among the funniest moments in Cheers history! The sitcom, which is available streaming in full with a Paramount+ subscription and the first four seasons via a Hulu subscription, has a lasting legacy in TV shows and pop culture, and not just because because the "Where Everybody Knows Your Name" theme song is as catchy in 2025 as it was back in the '80s and early '90s.
The show went on to launch Frasier as a spinoff, and it's possible that Ted Danson might not have landed his future lead roles if he hadn't proved himself for so long on Cheers. In fact, the relationship between Danson's Sam and Shelley Long's Diane is so iconic that I'd heard of "Sam and Diane" before I'd seen even an episode of Cheers.
You can revisit any and all episodes of Cheers streaming now, as well as hear from Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson in their Where Everybody Knows Your Name with Ted Danson & Woody Harrelson (Sometimes) podcast.
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