Cheers 1.1: Give Me a Ring Sometime

Airdate: 9/30/82

A somewhat stuffy intellectual named Diane Chambers arrives at the Cheers bar in Boston, along with her fiancé, a college professor of literature named Sumner. She immediately takes a disliking for the bar’s owner, Sam Malone, a former major league baseball player who’s also a recovering alcoholic. She also meets two other bar employees: “Coach,” a rather dull-witted but lovable former baseball coach, and Cara sassy, scrappy mother of four. The bar also gets its fair share of regulars, including Norm, a portly, affable accountant who is greeted by the bar patrons every time he arrives.

When Sumner goes back to see his ex, Sam correctly predicts that he will leave Diane high and dry. Sensing her predicament, he offers her a job as a waitress at the bar, which she rejects at first, until she sees that her photographic memory could serve her well in remembering drink orders.

From the very beginning of the show, the cold opening, one can already detect the confluence of sharp, skilled writing and near-perfect comic timing that made Cheers such a hallmark of classic sitcoms. The setup was brilliantly conceived – no other successful show was set almost entirely at a bar, and in so doing Cheers was able to draw upon a cavalcade of characters not related by family and not exclusively job-based. This provided a different kind of dynamic, one based on the notion that this was a refuge, a gathering place for brethren united by troubles that are “all the same.” And the crux of the show, Sam and Diane’s tenuous but sexually frustrated relationship, provided just enough chemistry (and razor-sharp banter) to keep viewers riveted every week.
 

This particular episode, in addition to setting up the characters, also does a good job in celebrating the work, and necessity, of a bartender: in essence the running theme of the show. When one of the minor characters leaves, he says to Sam, “Thanks for lettin’ me bend your ear,” and we can sense that he truly means it. Add to this the irony of Sam being a nondrinker, and you have so may possibilities for branching character development – exactly the mark of a good, sturdy pilot.