When people talk about the worst season of Cheers (which yes, I realize is a conversation starter only for television nerds like myself), most will point out the most obvious. Season ten, when the show was sputtering out of gas, relying on another Bar Wars and Rebecca/Sam tease to slog through twenty-plus episodes; season six, when Shelley Long’s absence created a massive hole in the show’s cast and stories; or season nine, which centered on one of the show’s worst plot lines, the Robin/Rebecca/Sam triangle. But for my money, season five – Shelley Long’s last – is far and away the worst season of the show, and for one reason: Diane.
Maybe the writers of Cheers were bitter over losing her, or maybe the writers just didn’t like the Diane character, but she goes out on a low note in Cheers‘ fifth season. Just the way she brutally humiliated Sam over and over again when he proposed was enough to drag the show down on an episode-to-episode basis; but once she took him to court and created a massive scene in “Chambers vs. Malone”, which really only pointed out how toxic their romantic relationship had become over five seasons of on-again, off-again. As the turning point for the entire season (as the 13th episode, “Chambers vs. Malone” is literally the halfway mark), everything in the emotional resolutions to follow in the next thirteen episodes are scarred by the previous thirteen, which reduced Sam to a frustrated, sniveling bartender and Diane to a selfish, completely self-indulgent and over-demanding waitress, removing any of the charm and allure that made her annoying tendencies endearing – or at the very least, comedic.
That’s not to say there aren’t any great stories in season five; but in retrospect, many of the “big” stories that season would turn out badly later on. Carla marrying hockey goalie-turned-Disney-on-Ice-entertainer Eddie was an emotional highlight for the most unlucky person in Cheers – except years later, after he dies, we find out he was cheating on Carla with an entire second family. Lilith and Frasier (the show’s most endearing couple) get engaged; which later ends in ugly divorce, sending Frasier west to become an uptight, elitist psychiatrist with a snooty brother and cranky father (I love Frasier, but boy does it butcher the subtle, layered character Cheers built over multiple seasons).
While I recognize that Cheers avoided comedic tropes largely by avoiding cathartic endings, there’s something particularly bitter about the big stories of the show’s fifth season, a certain ugliness that didn’t necessarily last with the show in the same form, but represented a major down-tick in quality for the entire season, something the last five, Long-less seasons of the show could never recover from. And it ends in the ugliest fashion possible for Long’s character; instead of marrying Sam, she walks out on him to move across the country and write a book. Call me old-fashioned, but can’t people write a book (one they’re getting a healthy advance for) anywhere?
Not only did it act as a poor disguise to remove Long from the show, but it undermined the entire nature of their supposed relationship, something the show had built since the pilot: instead of Sam and Diane being two self-obsessed people learning how to love, Sam learned how to love someone else, and Diane learned how to love herself (Sam will always hate himself a little bit, as every adult male or female does). Instead of being a love story with a bittersweet ending, season five of Cheers was just bitter – and that bitterness buried the show’s most endearing qualities in the post-Coach, pre-Woody age under a veneer of ugliness. There are other seasons of Cheers with consistently worse (or just pointless) episodes, but there’s nothing that hurts the show’s legacy more than season five, a season with some great episodes (“Tan ‘N Wash”, “Thanksgiving Orphans”, “Never Love a Goalie”, and numerous others) all brought down by the relentless pessimism of Sam and Diane, setting up a wedding the creators, writers, and audience knew would never happen (the most disappointing detail of them all).
Photos via NBC
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