Cheers and Taxi are my favorite sitcoms, but I liked Friends too.
Of the two I prefer Cheers.
But neither compare to my all time favorite sitcom-----NIGHT COURT!!!
Nah, you’re right. That was lame. It was late and my brain froze, thinking back on the episodes, but I wanted to start the thread before that comment in the OP got too old.
I also didn’t want to be insulting, but a bar full of curmudgeons, grumbling about pretty much everything is way less appealing to me than a group of young people trying to find their way in the world.
Based on the poll results, I’m in the small minority on my opinion.
I think I might actually go ahead and say Cheers is the best sitcom of all time. I think it got slightly weak the early Rebecca years but recovered quickly and eventually had some of its best seasons post-Diane, which is unusual that a sitcom so long running would lose a major cast member and actually continue at a high quality. Frasier and Lilith developed into incredibly strong characters. I frankly believe Cheers had a significantly stronger acting core as well. Most of the major cast members of Cheers had somewhat decent careers after the series, with the exception of Wendt / Ratzenberger / Perlman. That being said even though their careers weren’t big after Cheers, those three were anchors in Cheers itself and imo were easily the equal of anyone on the Friends roster.
Meanwhile the top end of Cheers acting cast has some real heavy hitters: Danson, Grammer, Harrelson all had sustained, high level careers after Cheers, with significant successes both in movies and other television series. Harrelson still regularly gets roles in good movies to this day, and Danson after the peak of his movie career ended had a long run of success in TV, Becker in the 1990s and then a monster run in the 2010s with multiyear appearances in series like Damages and The Good Place (both critically acclaimed), along with stops at big money making primetime shows like CSI for 4 years.
Aniston is about the only Friends cast member to have much of any career after Cheers and even that frankly was fairly limited.
Hey that was fun to watch. Thanks!
I still prefer Cheers though.
These are excellent points. Humor at another’s expense, the mainstay of Cheers, is mean. Whereas humor about situations is better.
Hard to say. I remember watching Cheers when I was a kid when I was 10 to 21 years old. So for me, it was mostly being a little kid watching a funny show about grown-ups. In contrast, I was 22 and in collage when Friends premiered. So I identified with it more as a funny show about my Gen-X peer group.
I’ve never noticed the humor on Cheers to be mean. It might be playfully teasing at times, but I can’t remember a single time I’ve felt it was mean. I’ve always thought of it as a very heartfelt and kind show. Now the aforementioned It’s Always Sunny in Philadephia, on the other hand … that’s some mean, and hilarious, humor.
Cheers, for me. As one who was a regular at a neighbourhood bar when the show was popular, it resonated with me. I could see our regulars in the characters (the know-it-all, the snippy waitress, the guy who always sat on the same barstool, etc.). They did much like we did–the banter, the playful ribbing, and so on. Best of all, nearly everything occurred in the bar itself, or in the bar’s back room. Anything other than those locations were rare.
Friends, not so much. Yes, they had a public place they hung out (the cafe), but it got confusing when they weren’t there–whose apartment is this scene in? It was thus difficult to follow at times, while Cheers, with its one location, was very easy to follow.
Damn right. I can’t stand anything at all about Shelly Long as an actress, yet Cheers was such a great show that I still enjoyed it. Liked the show a lot better after she got replaced, though.
Eh apples to oranges.
Friends has definitely aged better.
I somewhat disagree that Friends has aged better, frankly I see Cheers as almost timeless.
Cheers primarily deals with humor around human interaction. I disagree that it is mean spirited or that Cheers was a bar full of curmudgeons grumbling about “pretty much everything.” That is so alien to the actual personality of characters like coach, Woody, Cliff, Sam. Norm and Frasier tend towards being more melancholy but even they are pretty positive characters over the show’s story arc. I feel like someone who would describe Cheers as just being about a bar of curmudgeons is someone who watched like one episode and judged the whole series on it.
A show I actually think is heavily dated is Seinfeld. When Seinfeld went off the air I would have claimed it was the best sitcom of all time, better than Cheers or any earlier shows. As time has passed (and I’ve rewatched it plenty of times), I actually think Seinfeld has fallen off considerably with time.
It isn’t that it wasn’t a well made show, but it’s because it’s hyper situational, I think in part because Larry David and Jerry frankly don’t “understand people” that well, their humor is more built around pointing out social conventions that they find tedious and dumb (and it should be noted I think Jerry has said he actually has Asperger’s and it wouldn’t shock me to find out David was on the spectrum.) But part of the “problem” with this type of humor is to find it as funny, you need the shared cultural zeitgeist. Even as someone who lived through the entirety of the 90s obviously, I dunno, times have changed, and some of the cultural conventions that Seinfeld and Larry were making fun of just don’t resonate as much anymore.
Meanwhile Cheers, and for that matter Friends, are much more stories about human characters who happen to get into funny situations. Seinfeld is about exasperating and odd situations that happen to somewhat blank-slate humans who all kinda break the rules of what is expected of them.
Both good, but I have to go with Friends.
I watched a couple of episodes of Cheers recently and I did not enjoy them at all. The one where Norm pretends to be gay? Naah, it felt quite a bit dated, my 16 y.o. daughter couldn’t even sit through half an episode.
Whereas she is bingeing Friends with her Mom and enjoying it immensely (she even has the sweatshirt!), so clearly it still has appeal for the youngs.
It is a popular position to bash Friends, but it had some funnies. But Cheers was much more my style.
IMHO Frasier leaves them both in the dust.
mmm
I didn’t watch Cheers until last year. Now it’s my second favorite sitcom. I never got into Friends.
There is a series on CNN on the history of sitcom. It shows how the sitcoms have changed and goes into current events. Last Sunday the topic was sitcoms based on friends. It started with The Odd Couple and included discussions on Cheers, Seinfield and Friends.
Sorry, obvious answer is WKRP
Friends is also popular with the geriatric set, at least it is in my experience. It’s very popular among the nursing home crowd. My guess is that about 1/4 (which is the more than any other show) of my patients watch Friends reruns during the day. It’s also what the staff set the TV in the common area to.
I grew up with “Friends”, so I like it better. I think that’s kind of inevitable to be honest. Older generations that grew up with “Cheers” probably like that better.
Cheers started airing in 1982 and it’s been off the air now for about 28 years now so I would agree with you that it’s quite a bit dated at this point. In 1983, there was an episode where one of Sam’s teammates from his baseball days, a guy he roomed with frequently while on the road, comes out of the closet. Sam is reluctant to support him because he doesn’t want people to think he’s gay but he finally does because the guy is his friend. Several of Sam’s regular patrons are worried that Cheers will turn into a gay bar and when they see two guys they’re convinced are gay threaten to leave the bar if Sam serves them. Sam agonizes for a bit before telling them that he doesn’t want the bar to be the type of place he has to throw people out of and he serves them.
That episode first aired in 1983 and by the time Cheers went off the air in 1993. But I can see how someone born in 1995 would watch that episode and wonder what the big deal was.