Flash forward to the year 2000. Seinfeld, the NBC sitcom starring Jerry Seinfeld as one of a quartet of angst-ridden New Yorkers, is finally going off the air after 10 acclaimed seasons. For the gala final episode, Julia Louis- Dreyfus makes a return appearance as Elaine (the movie career didn't work out) and meets her successor in the cast, Melanie Mayron. In a typically Seinfeldian life-imitates-art riff, George (Jason Alexander), now head of network programming, tells Jerry his sitcom is being canceled. Kramer (Michael Richards), elected to Congress in the eighth season, finds himself involved in a sex scandal. Meanwhile, Jerry wonders just what's the deal with those little air bubbles in packing crates . . .
Hold on. One farewell at a time. The Seinfeld gang may be the hottest in TV comedy right now, but they are hardly the type to horn in on somebody else's celebration. And Cheers, as everybody knows, is the show saying the lavish goodbyes this month: only three more episodes left, culminating in a 90-minute finale on May 20 in which Shelley Long (who left after the fifth season) returns as Diane Chambers. And the festivities don't end there. Preceding the last show will be a 30-minute special featuring clips from past seasons. Following it, the Tonight show will originate from Boston's Bull and Finch bar, the model for the Cheers pub. It's all part of what NBC is trumpeting as "the television event of a lifetime."
Sort of. The end of Cheers may not have the emotional resonance of the M*A*S*H finale, but it's a TV milestone worth toasting. For a decade, Cheers has represented the gold standard of TV comedy writing, directing and acting, having won 26 Emmy awards and reigned in the Nielsen Top 10 for eight straight seasons. Yet Cheers' departure dovetails so neatly with the emergence of the show that will take over its time slot next season that the transition seems almost a generational passing of the torch. As the Cheers era ends, the Seinfeld era begins.
The shows have a few obvious similarities. Both are intelligent, verbally sophisticated sitcoms that focus on a group of friends linked by locale rather than family. Both are proof, moreover, of the oft-repeated TV adage that good shows take time to find their audience. Seinfeld went on the air in May 1990 but broke into the Top 10 only two months ago, when it was moved to Thursday nights after Cheers.
Cheers too struggled when it first went on the air in 1982: in its debut season it ranked dead last out of 75 prime-time shows. Yet, encouraged by critical acclaim and a slew of Emmys, NBC stuck with it. The show would probably still be going strong if it weren't for star Ted Danson's decision to leave at the end of this season. "Our thinking was, we rolled the dice twice, when we replaced Nick Colasanto ((with Woody Harrelson)) and Shelley Long ((with Kirstie Alley)), and we won," says James Burrows, who created the show with Glen and Les Charles and has directed nearly every episode. "We didn't want to risk that again. It is better to leave early than to leave late."