Three ‘Cheers’ and a Lot More : After All the Hype, How Can Everybody Not Know Their Names?

First of all, everybody pick a colored pawn that represents the Cheers character that most closely resembles your own personality and place it on its matching colored square on the game board.

--From the rules for Cheers, the trivia game

You knew “Cheers” was unique from the moment that snobby Diane entered Sam’s place on Sept. 30, 1982, accompanied by the college professor fiance who would jilt her, sentencing her to years of servitude as a barmaid.

From the instant of that initial, tone-setting antipathy/sexual tension between Sam and Diane, you knew you were hooked.

Then in walked foggy Coach with his own hilarious one-liners. Then testy Carla. Then beer-guzzling Norm. Then Norm’s drinking mate, Cliff.

Even though the gaudy ratings would come later, it was immediately obvious that executive producers Glen Charles, Les Charles and James Burrows had created something quite grand, that “Cheers” would turn out to be one of the best written and performed, funniest, most endearing prime-time comedies ever, that it would endure 11 seasons on NBC, run 275 episodes and win 26 Emmys en route to tonight’s finale. Yes, an absolute given.

But pu leeze ! This is a television series, not the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is the cast of a sitcom, not the cast of the Last Supper.

What these actors do on the screen is all that matters. What’s on their minds--their thoughts about themselves, each other, the world, what they had for breakfast, their psychoanalysis of their “Cheers” characters--is only moderately interesting, at best. Yet by now, Ted Danson (Sam), Shelley Long (Diane), Kirstie Alley (Rebecca), Rhea Perlman (Carla), George Wendt (Norm), John Ratzenberger (Cliff), Woody Harrelson (Woody, who supplanted Coach after actor Nicholas Colasanto’s death), Kelsey Grammer (Frasier) and Bebe Neuwirth (Lilith) probably have become the most interviewed cast in the history of television.

NBC’s “Today” co-host Katie Couric, thoughtfully, profoundly, to Wendt: “What is it about Norm that, you, George Wendt, found so appealing?” What, and blow the autobiography?

If one word characterizes TV-driven popular culture, it’s excess --the steroidal massing that comes from going too far, artificially swelling something beyond what’s natural. Hence, the thick blizzard of glorifying ticker tape for tonight’s final episode of “Cheers” that NBC--based on the show’s No. 1 ranking in last week’s national Nielsen ratings--is hoping will attract 120 million viewers. That’s practically half the nation.

Super Bowl Thursday.

More accurately, super bar, as NBC’s Boston pub-based megacomedy belches goodby after all those seasons of stool sitting. Set ‘em up: First comes the retrospective with Bob Costas at 9 p.m. (on Channels 4, 36 and 39), then the show itself at 9:22, followed by the inevitable “Cheers” tie-in interviews on the 11 p.m. KNBC-TV Channel 4 news, leading to Jay Leno schmoozing with the cast on “The Tonight Show” at 11:35.

There’s precedent for such panoramic hype, extending at least as far back as the shrewdly spooned-out hoopla leading to the final episode of “The Fugitive” in 1967, which persuaded an extraordinary number of Americans to watch long-tormented Richard Kimble finally track down the mysterious one-armed slayer of his wife.

Those “Dallas” season-ending cliffhangers--particularly the “Who Killed J.R.?” mystery that bridged the 1979-80 and 1980-81 seasons--were also masterpieces of marketing. And “MASH” ended its own 11-season run in 1983 with an enormously touted 2 1/2-hour special that drew the largest television audience of all time.

Nor could anyone have avoided the promotional huffing and puffing that preceded this season’s “Murphy Brown” opener, making it seem almost a patriotic duty for Americans to learn how Murphy would counterattack Vice President Dan Quayle.

Yet it’s hard to imagine a foamier head of hype than the relentless chug-a-lugging for “Cheers” as it passes into first-run history. And that hype has come not just on television--witness the just-released Cheers trivia game featuring 50 Normisms, 50 Cliffisms and a box of question cards:

“What did Diane sarcastically suggest that Sam donate to the public television auction? (a) His jock strap, (b) A lock of hair, (c) His car.” His jock strap, dummy!

The print press has also enlisted in this “Cheers” crusade. Here’s a toast to those magazines that displayed remarkable restraint by not showcasing “Cheers” on their May covers: WaterSki, House & Garden, Popular Electronics, National Review, Filipinas, Mobile Office, Country Guitar, Yoga Journal and Guns & Ammo.

On television, meanwhile, “Entertainment Tonight,” that press agent’s dream, is just now ending its trickled-out series on “Cheers” bloopers. And reporting has rarely been more chauvinistic than on NBC recently, headed by the week’s worth of orgasmically ecstatic “Cheers” stories on the NBC News program “Today” and Channel 4 local newscasts at 5 p.m. and 11 p.m.

Hardly outdone was Tuesday night’s “Dateline NBC,” which attached its own promotional igniters to “Cheers” with a celebration of the series that was advertised with footage of Jane Pauley getting carried off by members of the cast.

This brand of unethical news-entertainment cross-promotion--in which usual criteria for news are suspended so that everyone can unite in an effort to win one for the company--now happens so routinely that viewers are probably desensitized to it.

KTLA-TV Channel 5 this week offered a variation on the same theme. Like a jackal nibbling on a bigger predator’s kill, it turned the present fervor over “Cheers” to its own advantage by airing a bloc of its “Cheers” reruns in prime time across three nights, packaged as a retrospective. The host for this spectacle, smartly decked out in a “Cheers” T-shirt and cap, was the station’s morning-news entertainment reporter, Sam Rubin.

Viewers of Channel 5’s morning news on Monday saw what may have been TV’s most creative cross-promotion disguised as an irreverent cross-promotion parody. It came when the inventive Rubin used technological sleight-of-hand to get an exclusive interview with himself about the station’s “Cheers” festival that he was hosting and promoting. Like a hologram from ABC’s “Wild Palms,” Rubin got along famously with himself.

All of this calculated heavy breathing over “Cheers” is the antithesis of the wonderfully fresh and spontaneous comedy that Sam and his barflys have come to represent, and in a curious way it detracts from the experience of saying goodby to old friends.

“Cheers” the series was not business as usual. “Cheers” the mania is.