One of the strongest arcs during its final season and the best set-up for the superior spin-off that followed — Frasier — finds Cheers’ resident psychiatrist Dr. Frasier Crane experiencing more heartache and anxiety than his patients when he learns that Lillith (Bebe Neuwirth) has fallen in love with another man and has decided to leave both Frasier and their son Frederick to journey with her new beau to live in an eco-pod. Threatening to jump from Cheers and finding himself so mixed up he nearly winds up sleeping with Rebecca (again playing against our preconceived ideas of what will happen to the bar’s resident cast), Frasier becomes the ideal anchor of the final season.
Moreover by growing and changing into something new, he seems to provide the ultimate therapy for the audience that will have to bid farewell to the place “where everybody knows your name” as the show realized it was time to close its doors. Thus, Frasier’s shocking plot made the perfect segue for a series that was ready to move onto to something more socially relevant since the Clinton era made the ideal setting for Frasier’s Seattle based, upper-crust sitcom that again managed to work in some of the classic blue-collar elements of its previous series with actors Peri Gilpin and John Mahoney (both of whom appear in tiny unrelated roles during this final season).
And I definitely do grant that the final episode does find a few things wrapped up nicely for certain characters as Rebecca marries someone you’d never expect and Woody is elected as a city official. Yet despite that there’s a wonderful twist involving Ted Danson’s character that will no doubt cause one to get a little teary-eyed when he realizes that, in a sense, the ultimate love of his life was none other than Cheers. For in the end it was more than just a bar but rather a show that transcended the art of the sitcom and gave everybody a nice, safe place to escape… at least for thirty minutes every Thursday night.
Article comments
1 - robo1936
Considering the name of the series was Cheers I found the ending was miserable and gloomy and features a bunch of men talking psycho babble about the meaning of life etc. We had just had the absolute pleasure of seeing the great Shelley Long say to Carla "My god you breed like flies" with such an expression on her face and such a tone in her voice that made it an absolutely classical statement. I didn,t buy the series from 6 onwards and I am glad I didn,t because other than Ted and Diane I found Carla as obnoxious as ever and Rebbeca an absolute embarassment. The trouble with Cheers was its writing team thought they were so good that they couldn,t make mistakes but with Diane NOT marrying Sam in the final and last episode of the series I thought was just ludicrous. They should have taken a lesson from Walt Disney who always ended his movies on a happy note and that is why they were so beloved. They should have listened to the viewinmg public a lot more and realised that what made Cheers soo good was the relationship between Diane and Sam and the brilliant acting of the two main stars and not soo much the writing.