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Thursday, July 18, 2013

Cheers 5:10: “Everyone Imitates Art”


Airdate: 12/4/86

Diane, self-delusionally, thinks a form rejection letter from a literary magazine is a way of telling her they won’t publish her poetry – just yet. Sam tries to give her the cold truth, explaining that he could submit something and get the same exact letter, but she takes him up on it. Her dare turns to horror when his poem does get published, and she, convinced that it’s plagiarized, scours every poetry book she can get to find its source. Sam, seeing that she’s suffered enough, confides that the poem came from one of her love letters to him. She goes from euphoria that she’s not a bad poet after all, to fury that Sam did this in the first place, then back to euphoria after noticing how he must have saved all of her love letters (he denies this, claiming he saves everything). Despite his eye-to-eye insistence that he no longer loves her, Diane is still giddily hopeful when she sees that he did indeed save all her epistolary outpourings to him.

Charming Perlman-scripted love-game episode, with Diane’s insecurity with her intellectualism as the comic engine here. Fun to see her in a manic state, cigarette-smoking, coffee swigging, going through book after book to doggedly find that doggone poem. Tone shifts toward the end with talk about the finality of Sam and Diane’s relationship, but as that is the running theme of this season, it must be kept going.

Cold open: Woody listens interestedly to an ad for a stenography school, but can’t keep up to write the phone number down.


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