Passing The Sitcom Torch

By Richard Zoglin

Flash forward to the year 2000. Seinfeld, the NBC sitcom starring Jerry Seinfeld as one of a quartet of angst-ridden New Yorkers, is finally going off the air after 10 acclaimed seasons. For the gala final episode, Julia Louis- Dreyfus makes a return appearance as Elaine (the movie career didn't work out) and meets her successor in the cast, Melanie Mayron. In a typically Seinfeldian life-imitates-art riff, George (Jason Alexander), now head of network programming, tells Jerry his sitcom is being canceled. Kramer (Michael Richards), elected to Congress in the eighth season, finds himself involved in a sex scandal. Meanwhile, Jerry wonders just what's the deal with those little air bubbles in packing crates . . .

Hold on. One farewell at a time. The Seinfeld gang may be the hottest in TV comedy right now, but they are hardly the type to horn in on somebody else's celebration. And Cheers, as everybody knows, is the show saying the lavish goodbyes this month: only three more episodes left, culminating in a 90-minute finale on May 20 in which Shelley Long (who left after the fifth season) returns as Diane Chambers. And the festivities don't end there. Preceding the last show will be a 30-minute special featuring clips from past seasons. Following it, the Tonight show will originate from Boston's Bull and Finch bar, the model for the Cheers pub. It's all part of what NBC is trumpeting as "the television event of a lifetime."

Sort of. The end of Cheers may not have the emotional resonance of the M*A*S*H finale, but it's a TV milestone worth toasting. For a decade, Cheers has represented the gold standard of TV comedy writing, directing and acting, having won 26 Emmy awards and reigned in the Nielsen Top 10 for eight straight seasons. Yet Cheers' departure dovetails so neatly with the emergence of the show that will take over its time slot next season that the transition seems almost a generational passing of the torch. As the Cheers era ends, the Seinfeld era begins.

The shows have a few obvious similarities. Both are intelligent, verbally sophisticated sitcoms that focus on a group of friends linked by locale rather than family. Both are proof, moreover, of the oft-repeated TV adage that good shows take time to find their audience. Seinfeld went on the air in May 1990 but broke into the Top 10 only two months ago, when it was moved to Thursday nights after Cheers.

Cheers too struggled when it first went on the air in 1982: in its debut season it ranked dead last out of 75 prime-time shows. Yet, encouraged by critical acclaim and a slew of Emmys, NBC stuck with it. The show would probably still be going strong if it weren't for star Ted Danson's decision to leave at the end of this season. "Our thinking was, we rolled the dice twice, when we replaced Nick Colasanto ((with Woody Harrelson)) and Shelley Long ((with Kirstie Alley)), and we won," says James Burrows, who created the show with Glen and Les Charles and has directed nearly every episode. "We didn't want to risk that again. It is better to leave early than to leave late."

In most ways, though, Cheers and Seinfeld line up on opposite sides of TV's generational divide. Cheers is the product of a group of writers and producers who learned their craft in the 1970s at the MTM factory and created such hits as Mary Tyler Moore and Taxi. Their shows typically revolve around the workplace rather than the family, are filled with intricately crafted one- liners and feature ensemble casts of exaggerated comic types. By the end of its run, the Cheers laughpoints had become so familiar -- Woody's naivete, Carla's surly put-downs, mailman Cliff's out-to-lunch monologues -- that the show seemed almost to write itself:

Frasier (reading a goodbye letter from Lilith): "Dear Frasier: Life in the Eco Pod is wonderful. Gogie and I are happier than we've ever been. Please start divorce proceedings. Our marriage is . . ." (He is overcome.)

Woody (dumbly): Made in heaven?

Frasier: ". . . our marriage is over."

Cliff: That really burns my hide that Lilith sent him that mailgram.

Frasier: Well, thank you, Cliff.

Cliff: All of a sudden a first-class stamp isn't any good anymore?

Cheers was TV's most well-oiled comedy engine, but that machinelike predictability was its major drawback. Regular characters came and went, coupled and uncoupled, but the relationships seemed inspired less by anything organic in the show than by the simple need to open up new gag territory. Gags, moreover, that too often depended on the quaint TV fiction that people always play out their intimate moments in front of at least four other people. Cheers was a bar where everybody not only knew your name; they also knew your embarrassing secrets and the details of your sex life.

The characters in Seinfeld talk about intimate things too, but they at least come across as friends who might really confide in one another. Maybe because they are, in a sense, all variations on the same person. The series (created by Seinfeld with writer Larry David) is, like several other new-generation sitcoms, an outgrowth of stand-up comedy material. Episodes spin off the sort of trivial incidents and observations that Seinfeld dwells on in his monologues. (Jerry feels guilty over a gift pen; Jerry's girlfriend thinks he picks his nose.)

Unlike the well-made, two-act structure of Cheers, Seinfeld episodes are freewheeling, anecdotal and -- paradoxically, for a show based on stand-up material -- almost devoid of typical sitcom one-liners. Here is George, for example, complaining that his new job as a comedy writer is going to waste: "Can you believe my luck? The first time in my life I have a good answer to the question 'What do you do?' and I have a girlfriend. I mean, you don't need a girlfriend when you can answer that question. That's what you say in order to get girlfriends. Once you can get girlfriends, you don't want a girlfriend, you just want more girlfriends." Jerry's deadpan reply: "You're going to make a very good father someday."

The characters on Seinfeld are more rounded and less stereotyped than practically any on TV. Kramer, for example, the next-door neighbor with the electric hair and thrift-shop wardrobe, could have been a typical sitcom shtick figure. Instead he's an impassioned eccentric with endless reserves of nuttiness. (After the group orders Chinese food, he shouts a final request into the phone: "And extra MSG!")

Seinfeld marks a TV departure in other ways as well. Brandon Tartikoff, former president of NBC Entertainment, who helped develop both shows, notes the ethnic gulf: "Cheers is the most goyish show on TV; Seinfeld is the most Jewish." The series, moreover, tackles sensitive subjects with almost brazen matter-of-factness. In this season's most famous episode, the group bet on which one of them could refrain from masturbating the longest. "I compare the show to The Twilight Zone," says supervising producer Larry Charles. "It is about behaviors that we don't like to admit about ourselves -- that we are sometimes greedy, sometimes selfish. Jerry is like Rod Serling -- a guide to take us to those lower depths." Out of those lower depths, Seinfeld is starting to soar.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Graphic by Steve Hart

CAPTION: Cheers Seinfeld

With reporting by Elizabeth L. Bland/New York