Cheers 5:19: “Dog Bites Cliff”

Airdate: 2/19/87

Cliff gets bitten by a dog during one of his postal rounds and plans to sue – to the tune of $200,000. He quickly changes his tune, however, when he meets the dog’s owner: a gorgeous blonde bombshell with a figure that could stop a diesel truck and eyes for… Cliff? The Cheers gang smells a rat, but Cliff thinks otherwise, especially when she pops up with a statement her lawyer wants him to sign, promising he won’t sue, and rips it up. Now, she says, they can continue with their relationship, and, specifically, consummating it in a hotel room, but before the big moment she feels shaky that they still have the lawsuit hanging over the heads. She just happens to have another copy of the statement, and this time Cliff signs it, right before she leaves to see her husband, a missing POW from a Chinese prison camp. Sam and the rest roll their eyes, but Cliff muses plaintively that they were a couple never meant to be, like Romeo and Juliet!

Diane takes off early in the episode, departing for a 2-week, soul-searching retreat at a monastery before the wedding, so the rest of the show covers the Cliff story. Of course, we know that once a sap always a sap, but his own obliviousness to it is what makes his character, and the episode, so endearing. Best scene is when he explains to cold-water-in-the-face Carla that it doesn’t matter if he’s being played; the important thing is that for these fleeting hours, he’s somebody with a babe on his arm. Shades of Marty here for this “Requiem for a Loser”-style treatment.

Cold open: Diane des her nails, and is in too good a mood for Carla’s jibes to work. “You’ll just have to get at me some other way.” She does – by slamming Diane’s hands down so her wet nails stick to the cottonballs.