Forty years ago, an impossible forty years ago, the second season of Cheers began and to this day I remember being disappointed. Admittedly, I only remember it this day because lately I’ve been reading some Cheers scripts and watching the odd episode, but it obviously lodged in my head deeply back then because it came back like it had been waiting, brooding.<\/p>\n
Do let me point out, if you don’t happen to already know, that Cheers is an exquisitely written sitcom from the 1980s. The show brought us Ted Danson, it brought us the whole spin-off Frasier. It also brought us Kirstie Alley and Woody Harrelson, but nobody’s perfect.<\/p>\n
If you haven’t seen it or don’t know it, have a read<\/a> of the pilot script, Give Me a Ring Sometime, by Glen and Les Charles. There is a character in it called Mrs Littlefield who was edited out of the final show, but even if her scenes don’t work well, the script is as fine a pilot as you can imagine. <\/p>\n But.<\/p>\n That was 1982 and it’s 1983 that’s on my mind, specifically some time in 1983 when the second season began airing here in the UK and immediately disappointed me.<\/p>\n Not because it wasn’t funny. Certainly not that. Cheers ran for 275 episodes and season 1 accounted for just 22 of those. No question, there are some tremendous episodes in the rest of the run.<\/p>\n But there was also something else. Or rather somewhere else. Quite a few somewhere elses.<\/p>\n Every minute of every one of those first season episodes is set in the Boston bar called Cheers. There is the main bar, there’s back pool room, a corridor between the two which also has the toilets – though we never see those – and an office. <\/p>\n Nothing else. No, wait, the main bar has a door to the outside and through that, and a window, you can see steps leading up from this basement bar to the street level.<\/p>\n But other than that, nothing. Effectively one single set for the entire first season. Since it was really a three-wall studio set, there also wasn’t a giant amount of variation you could have in camera angels. I don’t believe we ever saw the seating areas behind the bar, for instance.<\/p>\n I’m not certain of this now, it’s been such a long time, but I think that the episodes were so well written, so well made, that it did not occur to you that every single edition was effectively a bottle show. But then the second season opens and we’re in the apartment of one of the characters.<\/p>\n That’s when I realised we’d been in one set for a year, that’s when I appreciated just how incredibly hard to do that is, and unfortunately that’s when I was disappointed. Somehow taking us outside the bar didn’t feel like opening up the story, it felt like making the story easier.<\/p>\n When you just have one set, there isn’t a lot to point the camera at. I think Cheers was superbly designed and so scenes were visually well done, but even so, at 22 episodes and 1 set, every thing you could possibly look at was shown a lot.<\/p>\n Then for instance if you need two different conversations to be going on at the same time, you have to contrive a way for them to take place at opposite ends of the bar. You have to conjure up reasons for characters to move between them.<\/p>\n And then the bar was in a basement so there was never any daylight, never any evening time, never the slightest difference in the lighting. So if you need us to know it’s mid-afternoon and Norm is drinking very early, or if you need us to know it’s 2am and he’s still there for “just one more and then I really have to go”, you have to find a way to tell us.<\/p>\n It’s fascinating to me how hard all of this is and how I don’t believe we register that as we watch. Cheers gets a lot of very deserved praise for being funny, but it was so clever, too.<\/p>\n Cheers did the one-set trick best, I think and certainly for the longest time that I know of, but I realise now that I am just generally drawn to confined stories. I’ve been watching Doctor Who, going right back to the start in 1963 and this week finally reaching Peter Davison’s era, and there are many stories where the action is in a single set or just a couple of them.<\/p>\n I get how I can appreciate the difficulty and I get how I can applaud when confined drama or comedy is done well. But I can’t understand why I am so drawn to single-set pieces as a writer as much as a viewer.<\/p>\n Unless it’s because I’m cheap.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Forty years ago, an impossible forty years ago, the second season of Cheers began and to this day I remember … Continue reading