Cheers: The Complete 8th Season (DVD)
APPROX. 0 MINS. - PROD. YEAR: 1989 - MPA RATING: NR
" As Norm might say, Cheers episodes are like beer nuts. It's tough to stop at one handful.
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Wanna get away?
"Cheers" creators James Burrows, Glen Charles, and Les Charles may have wanted to, after "Murphy Brown" dethroned their popular sitcom as Outstanding Comedy Series. But there was some consolation for the 1989-90 season—the show's eighth. "Cheers" finished #3 in the Nielsens behind "The Cosby Show" and "Roseanne," and Ted Danson finally picked up an Emmy for his role as "Mayday" Sam Malone, the on-again / off-again Romeo and proprietor of the little Boston bar where everybody knows your name. In previous seasons, Danson had a few good lines but often had little more to do than to look into the camera and register a smile or dead-panned reaction to another character's "funny." This season, he plays the straight man less and gets plenty of his own zingers in, as, of course, do the other Cheers regulars.
"How many do you have to score with to understand just one?" the former Red Sox pitcher says, and he's not talking baseball. In Sam's case, that's a euphemistically redundant statement, because this season the person he wants to "understand" is his boss, Rebecca Howe (Kirstie Alley). Most of the words in Sam's vocabulary are code words for come-ons of one sort or another, and Sam's sexual obsessions and prowess (he's probably the most oversexed character in TV history) are a large part of the show's humor. He is to gender what Archie Bunker was to race, and there's proof of that just about every time he opens his mouth. "How can I care about her?" he thinks aloud. "We haven't done the main thing that I care about!"
This is a season of more Sammy angst, as he comes oh-so-close to bedding his boss in the very first episode, only to lose her to jet-setting English billionaire Robin Colcord (Roger Rees). "I spent three years loosening the lid on that peanut butter jar, and right now she's sticking to the roof of somebody else's mouth," Sam complains.
It's also the season that celebrates the show's 100th episode with the birth of a son to snobbish shrinks Frasier (Kelsey Grammer) and Lillith (Bebe Neuwirth). Naïve Woody (Woody Harrelson) has a few more very funny encounters with an even more air-headed (but rich) girlfriend, Kelly (Jackie Swanson), and mailman Cliff (John Ratzenberger) is revisited by an old postal flame. You don't have to have seen the previous seven seasons to enjoy this one, but it certainly helps you appreciate Sammy's state of mind if you can recall the turbulent years he spent with drive-you-nuts Diane Chambers (Shelley Long). When you watch Carla LeBec (Rhea Perlman) deal with the freakish death of her husband, Eddie (Jay Thomas), and also having to deal with Eddie's other widow, it's not necessary to know that Carla was the divorced single parent of a brood of delinquents for many years before she met him. But it certainly enriches your appreciation of her and lines like, "Men aren't pigs. Pigs are smart" if you do.
There are, of course, two sides to every story, and gender wars are as prevalent at 112 1/2 Beacon Street as the Bar Wars between Cheers and Gary's Old Towne Tavern. At one point the battle of the sexes leaves Frasier with a Band-Aid on his forehead. "Suffice it to say, Lamaze class is not the place to flirt." As perennial barfly Norm (NORM!) summarizes, "Women. Can't live with 'em . . . . Pass me the beer nuts."
Twenty-six episodes are contained on four discs in this set, for a total of 10 hours and 19 minutes of barfly antics. Some of the more memorable ones include the shows with Carla and Eddie's other widow, an episode where souse Norm (George Wendt) adopts a gruff alter ego in order to buffalo his workers, and the Crane's bris episode. Here's the rundown:
1-2) "The Improbably Dream," Pts. 1 & 2—Rebecca dreams about Sam, but ends up jetting off with Robin Colcord.
