Change in the House of Barflies: Why the ‘Cheers’ Finale Is Television’s All-Time Great Ending

Of all the gin joints in all the towns in the world, she walks into ours. 

It’s the most breathtaking moment in the eleven-season history of television’s biggest comedy. Diane Chambers (Shelley Long), the high-strung intellectual who won the heart of recovering alcoholic and ex-ballplayer Sam Malone (Ted Danson) before abandoning it to pursue her dreams of writing, walks back into the bar called Cheers. She’s riding the dubious high of having won a Cable ACE award — very much a punchline at the expense of both cable TV, then the broadcast networks’ distant also-ran, and Long, whose departure from the show six years earlier never quite led to the superstar career she’d been hoping for. (Don’t worry, Cheers got its digs in on Danson too; a couple episodes earlier they have him reveal he wears a hairpiece.)

But she’s back, and she’s nominally successful, and her arrival hits the bar like a bomb. We in the audience get caught in the blast radius too. After all, we’ve spent more time in Cheers at this point than Diane has — six seasons more, to be exact — and we have all the same memories of the highs and lows of her relationship with Sam as the characters do. Can he, can she, can they, can we really handle this change?

The question is a proxy for the finale itself. Airing on May 20 1993, it’s the conclusion of a decade-plus run in which Cheers changed the face of comedy and television pretty much forever. Losing any long-running show we’re fond of stings, of course. But Cheers is special. More than any other sitcom this side of Gilligan’s Island, it’s about the way things stay the same — the pleasant familiarity of old friends, the local dive, a barstool worn down into a comfortable groove by the accumulated weight of thousands of nights of pressure from the same pair of buttcheeks. The finale works because it confronts the audience and the characters with the same question: Are we ready to move on?

Again, it’s a trickier question with Cheers than with most sitcoms, for a very important creative reason. After the departure of Diane and the abandonment of the Sam-Diane plotline in 1987’s Season 5 finale, the show’s emphasis shifted. Everyone in the bar had always been depicted as lovable losers, Diane and Sam included. Now, however, the characters’ status as losers, perhaps even with a capital L, was brought into sharper, even central, focus. 

Much of this was accomplished through the character of Rebecca Howe (Kirstie Alley). Brought in as a replacement for the departing female lead, she initially appeared to be a hard-charging corporate-climbing businesswoman. But this illusion disintegrated the first time Alley opened her mouth to cry, a comedic task she was better at than anyone in the history of television. Rebecca was a whiner, a crybaby, a gold-digger, a shirker, a general incompetent. In other words, she fit right in next to womanizer and struggling businessman Sam, perpetually unemployed Norm, idiotic Woody, brood-rearing Carla, slumming Frasier, icy Lilith, and…whatever Cliff is. And the thing is, she knew it.

With even Sam’s nominal love interest aware of her own loser status — something Diane had never acknowledged (nor perhaps needed to) — the gloves were off. The show could dig deep into the idea that “the gang at Cheers,” as Carla’s ex husband Nick’s airheaded new wife Lorettta (Jean Kasem) always called them, were never going anywhere. The bar served as a closed environment, an ecosystem unto itself, hermetically sealed and self-healing. New jobs, new interests, new romantic entanglements come and go — Sam and Rebecca spend several months trying to have a baby as platonic parents, Frasier and Lilith split and then reconcile, Woody marries his wealthy sweetheart Kelly — but everyone winds up back in the same place: Sam behind the bar, Rebecca in the manager’s office, Frasier at his barstool, and Woody at work, even though Kelly’s money (and eventually his job as a city councilman) eliminated the need for it. 

Cheers even served up a new sort of mascot for the bar and its denizens in the form of Paul. Played by Paul Wilson (below left), one of the show’s crew of recurring background barflies promoted to guest star status, Paul’s job is to be an even bigger loser and outcast than the rest of the gang. He’s always on the outside looking in, rarely cool enough even to be included in Cliff and Norm’s hijinks. It’s like the bar coughed up a living version of itself, a tulpa embodying its spirit.

The finale changes all that. I mean, obviously. It’s the end of the show, and by definition the show can’t go on. Absent some cameos on Frasier — a show I consider dubiously canonical in Cheers terms, though I’ve got no problem viewing it as one of several diverging timelines — we’ll never learn what became of Sam and the gang. There’s no tune-in-next-week to speak of.

But more than that, the finale is about change — positive change at that. In short order, prior to or during the finale, Sam goes into counseling for sex addiction, Rebecca marries a sweet and hunky plumber for love rather than money and quits her job, Norm gets a gig working for the government through Woody’s city councilman connections, and even Cliff gets a promotion at the post office. The idea is very clearly to create the impression that with Diane back, anything is possible.

Except Sam and Diane. Don’t doubt for a second that the romantic chemistry isn’t still there — I defy you not to gasp the moment Diane walks back into that bar for the first time in six years, trailing television’s greatest romance behind her. Indeed, Sam and Diane barely make it through dinner before their mutual ruses fall apart (they both pretended to be married) and they’re racing back to bed together. Only when they get on the plane to Los Angeles do they realize they’re making a mistake: Sam rushing into this relationship out of fear of winding up alone, Diane putting that animal attraction and a desire for a happy ending ahead of her own evolved needs.

So Sam slinks back to the bar, where, after the rest of the cast departs one by one, Norm informs Sam he has indeed returned to his one true love: the bar itself. 

Which is where the emotional trick the episode is playing reveals itself. “One for the Road” is a lengthy meditation on how much Sam needs the the gang and the bar; the question of whether he’ll wind up alone is irrelevant, because, for better or for worse, he can always go where everybody knows his name.

But we can’t. Sam’s final line is “We’re closed,” but in his world, the bar will reopen tomorrow. Not for us. The eleven seasons and however many hundreds of episodes we’ve gotten from Cheers is all we’re ever going to get. Change has come, whether we want it or not — we almost certainly don’t want it, making us love Cheers the bar was Cheers the show’s greatest skill — and unlike Sam, we have to move on.

Our emotional journey, then, mirrors Sam’s with Diane. We remember the great times, we still love the person who brought them to us, but those times have passed. We have to let them fly away and get on with the less magical prospect of living without them.

“Whether it’s your favorite person, your favorite place, or your favorite show, you can’t hang onto it forever. At some point we all have to close it up for the night. Maybe tomorrow we’ll find somewhere else we wanna go.”

Written by series co-creators Glen Charles and Les Charles and directed by third co-creator James Burrows, the finale of Cheers feels sad. I remember it coming in for criticism about this at the time — hell, I just witnessed it reduce the 12-year-old kid I was re-watching it with to tears. But that’s as it should be. Cheers was that magical place sung of in Gary Portnoy and Judy Hart Angelo’s theme song, a place where everybody knows your name. In that sense it was, pun intended, a show about the NORM! — an ode to things staying basically the way you’d like them to be. In the finale, that glorious sameness comes to an end, and the show makes you wrestle with it alongside the characters themselves. 

Whether it’s your favorite person, your favorite place, or your favorite show, you can’t hang onto it forever. At some point we all have to close it up for the night. Maybe tomorrow we’ll find somewhere else we wanna go.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.