“You know something, I hate change. I mean you know, every day you wake up something’s changed. Everything just changing so fast, I like things to stay the way they are, you know. I like things you can count on.” -Woody Boyd, “One for the Road”
“The only reason I’m leaving is because I want what all of you have now: a new chapter. Who knows if it’ll even work out… While it’s tempting to play it safe, the more we’re willing to risk the more alive we are. In the end, what we regret most are the chances we never took.” -Frasier Crane, “Goodnight, Seattle”
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On May 20th, 1993, the most popular and arguably the defining American sitcom of the 1980s, Cheers, aired its final episode “One for the Road” after eleven years on the air. Bringing back Shelley Long’s Diane Chambers, the series’ co-lead from its first five seasons, it brought to a close the relationship arc between her and Ted Danson’s Sam Malone, capping off new developments for other characters as well. Ultimately it ended with Sam and Diane deciding against a romance together and Sam accepting his place permanently at Cheers, the real “love of his life”.
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Just over a decade later, on May 13th, 2004, Cheers’ highly successful spin-off series Frasier came to an end itself, also after eleven years, with its last episode “Goodnight, Seattle”. In it, a few season-long arcs are resolved as Kelsey Grammer’s Frasier Crane parts ways with his girlfriend Charlotte (Laura Linney) moving back to Chicago, as he then partakes in both the wedding of his father and the birth of his nephew before deciding on a change himself by accepting a new job offer in San Francisco. At the end it is revealed he has instead moved to Chicago to reunite with Charlotte.
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Both finales are highly popular and acclaimed -”One for the Road” was in fact the second most-watched series finale in the United States after M*A*S*H- both coming at a time that was probably right for their respective series, each having come out of their peak years probably a few seasons earlier, but neither quite having become nuisances yet by the time they ended. Both shows had been staples of their eras, and their finale represented the symbolic ending of those eras -especially in the case of Frasier’s which came on the heels of the final episode of fellow 90s hallmark Friends just a week before. And of course being related, both shows had their similarities of comic sensibility and style -sharing several writers and directors, even as Frasier came to necessarily evolve away from Cheers with the changing times and sitcom aesthetics.
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That in consideration, it’s curious to note the different tenors in theme of the two finales more than a decade apart. A series finale is often, whether intended to or not, taken as a conclusive statement on the show itself -it’s what audiences want (and is why certain finales like the infamous Seinfeld one, which offers no statement but trolling, don’t go over well). And Cheers and Frasier go out on what appear to be oppositional themes: Sam, though confronted with and tempted by a big change in his life, chooses ultimately to remain in the familiar world and routine that has been his comfort zone for the last sixteen years (he’d been running Cheers for five years before the series started). While Frasier, after eleven years of hosting his radio show and living with his family in Seattle, chooses to move on to a new and exciting chapter in his life. And yet while this makes the series feel more conclusive, it is the safer Cheers finale that feels more resolute to me -even with its more conservative track.
But to understand both finales, why they say what they do and what they mean, we must understand a little of the shows that spawned them -both series which, if you’re a sitcom fan like I am, are quite easy to like.
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Premièring exactly ten years before I was born on September 30th 1982, Cheers was created by writers Glen and Les Charles (previously showrunners on Taxi) and director James Burrows -who would direct the vast majority of its episodes. Set in a down-town Boston bar owned by former Red Sox relief pitcher Sam Malone (Ted Danson) -a recovered alcoholic who bought it during his drinking days- the show is about the various problems and hijinks of its regular gang of staff and regulars. During the early seasons, much of this was centred on the relationship between the lowbrow playboy Sam and cultured intellectual waitress Diane Chambers (Shelley Long) -the original will they-won’t they sitcom dynamic. The rest of the gang included Coach Ernie Pantusso (Nicholas Colasanto) -Sam’s kindly though simple-minded former coach turned bartender, Carla Tortelli (Rhea Perlman) -the abrasive and temperamental head waitress, Norm Peterson (George Wendt) -the sarcastic and miserable bar layabout, and Cliff Clavin (John Ratzenberger) -the bullshit-spewing know-it-all postman and Norm’s best friend. Later additions included psychiatrist Dr. Frasier Crane (Kelsey Grammer) -initially Diane’s stuffy new boyfriend in the third season, Woody Boyd (Woody Harrelson) -a cheerful and naive Indiana farm-boy who replaces Coach as bartender after Colasanto’s tragic passing at the end of the third season, Lilith Sternin (Bebe Neuwirth) -Frasier’s cold and deadpan psychiatrist girlfriend and later wife, and Rebecca Howe (Kirstie Alley) -a success-oriented gold-digger who comes on to manage the bar and be Sam’s foil after Diane exited the series at the close of the fifth season.
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That’s the point where the show’s run is commonly split in two -the early seasons dominated by that Sam-Diane dynamic, and the later seasons that cultivated more of a focus on the ensemble. But through it all Cheers remained consistent in its sense of comfort -the bar “where everybody knows your name” to quote the iconic theme song. Through the years there would be involved story arcs, drops of honest character moments, and a few lasting developments, but everything righted itself in the end. It was a show that stayed in its lane, that found a workable groove it rarely deviated from -understandably so, it made it one of the most popular shows on television. It still holds the record for most Emmy nominations for a sitcom: 117 with 28 wins, including four for Best Comedy Series (it was nominated every year), four for Perlman (nominated for every season but one), two for Danson, two for Neuwirth, and one apiece for Long, Alley, and Harrelson. In 1992, Danson opted to leave the series and so the decision was smartly made to end the show at the close of that season.
Reportedly looking to make his own exit shortly before Danson’s announcement, Kelsey Grammer was in search of a show of his own -initially to be a brand new project. Instead the decision was made by NBC, and which Grammer eventually agreed to, to spin-off Frasier Crane into his own series to be developed by a trio Cheers writers, David Angell, Peter Casey, and David Lee.
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Premièring on September 16th, 1993, just four months after Cheers ended, Frasier saw the ostentatious psychiatrist relocated to his home-town of Seattle following a finalized divorce from Lilith and her sole custody of their son Frederick. His new set-up has him hosting a modestly popular radio show produced by the sardonic, romantically liberal Roz Doyle (Peri Gilpin), while sharing his upscale apartment with his disabled blue collar father Martin (John Mahoney) -formerly a cop- and his quirky live-in physical therapist Daphne Moon (Jane Leeves), an immigrant from Manchester who is the lovelorn obsession of Frasier’s younger brother and fellow uptight psychiatrist Niles (David Hyde Pierce). The show, which frequently took on more of a farcical bent than its predecessor, often focused on Frasier’s unsuccessful dating life, his egotistical relationship to his own celebrity, and his and Niles’s efforts to ingratiate themselves in Seattle high society. Frequently the snobby interests and attitudes of the Crane boys would be contrasted against their father’s more grounded nature, and the show’s most significant subplot through its run concerned Niles’s love for Daphne, eventually blooming into a relationship after seven years of pining and the breakdown of Niles’s long-term marriage to unseen local socialite Maris.
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Unlike Cheers, Frasier didn’t undergo any dramatic cast changes over the course of its own eleven-year run, barring a brief period from seasons four through six when recurring character Bob “Bulldog” Briscoe (Dan Butler) -the obnoxious misogynist sports broadcaster at Frasier’s KACL radio station- was promoted to the main cast for the episodes he appeared in. Though it had its familiar traits and subgenres of episodes (dinner parties for instance) Frasier did not ascribe to formula as much as its predecessor, and was additionally slightly more ambitious -turning out episodes with experimental structures or serious character beats. This was a show that wasn’t afraid to put Frasier out of the job for a good chunk of its sixth season, that dared to advance the relationship between Niles and Daphne thereby putting to rest one of its most signature comic dynamics (and foreshadowing shows like The Office making similar leaps). Frasier is perhaps the model sitcom spin-off in terms of quickly distinguishing itself from its parent show, and though it was never as iconic to the 90s as Cheers was to the 80s, it was arguably more successful. Certainly it beat Cheers for wins at the Emmys -37 total out of 108 nominations, including a record five consecutive Best Comedy Series wins right out the gate, four for Grammer, four for Pierce (nominated every season the show was on the air), four for the writing, and five for guest stars like Derek Jacobi and Laura Linney. When Frasier wrapped in 2004, it brought to a close a TV continuity of twenty-two years, with Grammer in the role of Frasier for a clean two decades.
Obviously that is an impressive feat, rarely achieved by a live-action actor; and certainly both shows achieved a longevity exceeding their respective decade-plus on the air. The legacies of Cheers and Frasier, individual and together, continue to loom large over the sitcom format (especially now when it looks like no live-action TV comedy will ever attain even half their episode count again). When they ended, the gravity was known -"One for the Road" was a two-hour event while "Goodnight, Seattle" was twice the usual episode length. Careful thought was put into how best to end these series.
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Cheers's final season had an underlying victory lap pervading it. After struggling in the ratings during its first year, here it was now the biggest show on television, and it took advantage by filling its cold opens through the season with exterior scenes on location in Boston (something rarely done for much of the show), special guest stars and call-backs. Towards the end of the season a few resolving storylines began to kick in. Rebecca, spurned for the last time by a reformed Robin Colcord (Roger Rees) -her millionaire love interest from seasons eight and nine- humbles herself with a romance with a plumber played by Tom Berenger (they get engaged in the finale). Woody, in an arc that feels like a go-for-broke last season impulse, runs and is elected to the Boston City Council. And Sam finally is forced to confront his age and its correlation to his sex addiction in the penultimate episode. Still, other significant beats are raised and shied away from, like Cliff moving his mother into a senior’s residence before moving her back out at the last minute, and perhaps most complicating for the spin-off, Frasier and Lilith endure a dramatic break-up due to her infidelity, only to reconcile mere months before they would separate permanently between series. None of these changes really impact their lives at Cheers however, the centrepiece of the show. Even Woody seems intent to split his time between Council and the bar. No major change seems on the horizon …until Diane comes back.
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The central conflict at the heart of “One for the Road” is whether Sam will leave the bar for his six-years-overdue happy ending with Diane or remain at Cheers with the rest of the gang. This is what it was essentially sold as, and its hard to believe anyone seriously would have thought it wouldn’t end the way it did. The last six years of the show had demonstrated Sam could exist without Diane and that it was Cheers the bar that mattered more than anything in the show, certainly more than one romantic dynamic. In this way, Diane’s role in the finale is really just to be a tool for Sam’s last major conundrum, which is a bit unfair to Diane -it’s weird how the finale treats her both as a guest star and a more important figure in the bar than anyone minus Sam. But it does present the choice as authentically difficult. After a silly sequence in which both Sam and Diane pretend to be married, Sam to Rebecca, Diane to a gay colleague, they address the wounds left from her last appearance (season five’s “I Do, Adieu”), and are able to reconcile and pick things up again. But Glen and Les Charles actually handle it very maturely, the second thoughts coming to Sam and Diane simultaneously while on a plane to Los Angeles where Sam has decided to follow Diane to while selling Cheers. Many fans probably wanted the show to end here, with Sam and Diane getting together (it curiously parallels the framing device of the Frasier finale that actually would go through with such a thing).
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Ultimately though, Sam and Diane realize that it’s been too long, their lives are on different paths, and they don’t belong together -though they cherish the time they had. And so Sam comes back to Cheers and has an unusually deep heart-to-heart with the rest of the cast (minus Rebecca for some reason, who leaves on her honeymoon). It’s probably the high point of the episode -there’s a bit where Grammer nearly gets caught up in the emotion to be rescued by Wendt- and it ends with Woody and then Norm affirming Sam’s changeless nature and his encompassing loyalty to Cheers. It ends pretty perfectly with Sam calling himself the world’s luckiest son of a bitch (the one usage of that expletive in the entire series), before turning away a last minute customer framed in a rare shot outside the bar door -as though Sam is speaking to the audience: “sorry, we’re closed”; then straightening a portrait of Geronimo (a keepsake from Colasanto that had been hanging in the bar since his death), and disappearing into the back pool room before a final establishing shot -a direct mirror to the way the series began.
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I kind of think the stories set up for Sam and several other characters there at the end of Cheers were more interesting than many a plotline from the last few seasons. We would gets hints of those courtesy of the one character who did get that sustained follow-up -every main character but Rebecca turned up at some point on Frasier to fulfil “One For the Road”’s promise of nothing fundamentally changing for that gang (“The Show Where Sam Shows Up” is a little depressing for undoing some of the robust character development left by the end of Cheers).
But while that cast of characters continued on and had no ending, Frasier Crane did. Or rather an ending to the story that his show encompassed, chronicling the entirety of his life back in Seattle, between Boston and Chicago. Frasier’s final season began wrapping up arcs much sooner than Cheers -perhaps because it was preordained as the ending in a way that Cheers wasn’t. In a way, Frasier was actually building towards its ending from the moment Niles and Daphne finally got together at the end of season seven. As over the next four years they move from dating to getting married, Frasier begins having more anxieties about his life and relationship prospects -anxieties that the show takes seriously where earlier they would serve a gag. Frasier may not have had the era split down the middle that Cheers did, but it did evolve once it hit the 2000s into a show that took more time for sincerity.
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Within the first three or four episodes of the eleventh season, Daphne gets pregnant and Martin reconnects with an old love interest Ronee (Wendie Malick), who would stay with the show through that final year. Maris is brought back into the plot for the first time in years, so she can have radical ending written for her off-screen, and the show concretely pushes past the notions that had bubbled for a few years of a romance between Frasier and Roz. Frasier makes steps back towards a more conventional psychiatry career by opening up a private practice again, in addition to his radio show; and he and Lilith have one last heartfelt encounter. Towards the end of the season Martin proposes to Ronee, just two episodes before Frasier joins a matchmaking service run by Charlotte (Laura Linney). She becomes his last love interest on the show, though not before setting him up with Jennifer Tilly -who was fortuitously also Frasier’s first fling after Diane eighteen years prior on Cheers. Through the last handful of episodes, Frasier’s relationship with Charlotte evolves, as they become romantically involved, deal with the complication of her oblivious boyfriend (Aaron Eckhart), and reckon with an impending move by her to Chicago that would cut the romance short.
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This thread is top of line in “Goodnight, Seattle”, which is told in flashback by Frasier to a woman sat next to him on a plane -and if you’ve been following, it seems fairly clear what the context is. But the show tries to distract you from that by seemingly resolving that storyline first -it’s only a few minutes into the episode when Frasier and Charlotte say their goodbyes. The rest of the finale quickly moves on to the other points of order: Kenny Daly (Tom McGowan), the station manager at KACL for six years, rediscovers his passion for DJing and quits, resulting in Roz being named the new station manager. Simultaneously, Martin and Ronee have their wedding as Daphne goes into labour at a veterinary hospital, giving birth to her and Niles’ son David (named in honour of series co-creator David Angell who had died in the September 11th attacks). And it’s only after all of this happens in short succession that the story really comes back to Frasier.
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And there certainly was a feel through this episode and this season especially that the show needed to come back to Frasier. Despite him being the title character, much of the substantial material of the show had for years been in Niles and Daphne’s story. They were moving and growing while he seemed to be stuck in place. Nothing in Frasier’s career ever changed and his love life had just become a revolving door of failed dates. And one of the smartest things the show did in those last few years was acknowledge that. Frasier, like Sam before him, had a reality to face. And one could even read it uncharitably as the show's own producers realizing Frasier's status quo was becoming stale. He needs a change and by the very existence of the spin-off it is clear he's capable of one.
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Relatively early into the finale, Frasier is offered a new job opportunity by his ruthless agent Bebe Glazer (Harriet Sansom Harris) to host a TV show in San Francisco. By the end of the episode he has decided to take it. As he explains to his family after one last mini-farce where they believe he is dying, the combination of Niles and Daphne, Martin, and Roz each starting new chapters in their lives is what prompts his decision. Evoking Tennyson's "Ulysses" he gives one final show, thanking his audience (both in-universe and out), and signing off for the last time. The twist then comes at the very end when returned to the framing device on the plane it is revealed he hasn't moved to San Francisco, but followed Charlotte to Chicago. A happy ending (at least until last year's Frasier revival spoiled it!).
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What is the better way to end a series? The prospect of change or a retention of the status quo? Typically, the former ought to be favoured. The more progressive and truthful statement to make is that everything changes and that we shouldn’t be afraid of change -in fact, we should embrace it more often than not as a calling to growth. Many great series finales end on this note, with a conclusion to the core premise of the series and characters moving on: M*A*S*H, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Community, BoJack Horseman, Succession -to name just a few of my favourites. Yet there are also great series finales that leave you on the note of nothing fundamentally changing -at least on the surface: Star Trek: The Next Generation, Fleabag, the original endings to Futurama and Arrested Development (and then you’ve got something like The Sopranos which in its genius exists somewhere in limbo between the two).
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Cheers and Frasier I think each pick the right note to go out on respective to their series -the former quite openly affirming its values of comfort and familiarity epitomized in that quote from Woody, the latter vocally rejecting those values as it charts a new course as summed up in that statement by Frasier. Typically, I prefer the latter philosophy, and yet "One for the Road" is the show that resonates more than "Goodnight, Seattle". Some of this comes down to what I find to be a better structure. "One for the Road" maintains its throughline without a lot of obligatory notes it needs to hit; around the Sam and Diane wrap-up, the episode is free to be more loose with its little check-ins on the other mainstays and their lives -each allowed a few last jokes and reminders of why they were such good characters. And it effectively and subtly ties up the knots it needs to with an ending to the Sam-Diane show being followed by a heartfelt and sober tribute to the ensemble show. I also think that in spite of its adherence to status quo, the surety of Sam's new purpose does represent his arc coming to a respectable close, and is communicated very well. "Goodnight, Seattle" on the other hand suffers from its abundance of threads that need concluding; and with less time than its predecessor's finale, both Martin and Ronee's wedding and the birth of David Crane are somewhat underwhelming as a result. To maintain some efficacy to the final twist, Frasier has to be distracted through much of the show from the priority that has been front of mind the past several episodes. And we really didn't need Daphne's brothers crowbarred in just for the sake of getting special guests Richard E. Grant and Robbie Coltrane on the show -in addition to the recurring Anthony LaPaglia (while at the same time forgetting about their live-in mother, whose role in the series feels a tad inconclusive as a result). It's only the final act where the show really has its power -though in that it couldn't be executed better: following up one last comic sequence with well-earned poignancy.
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In the end, it was a strong enough note to conclude twenty-two years of television on. Cheers and Frasier may have left us with contradictory end theses, but they reflected well their respective series character. And by no means were they diametrically opposed. After “One for the Road” the Cheers story may still go on, but not entirely in the way that it had. And while “Goodnight, Seattle” may set Frasier on a new path, the Crane family have not changed drastically -you can be assured that, to quote the last line of another great show, the more things change the more they stay the same. Cheers and Frasier each chose final statements that were appropriate for them and for their legacy, both individual and combined. These shows and their writers intuitively understood what they were, and that’s not always been the case for series -certainly among the poorest finales we’ve seen it’s been obvious. I like Cheers and Frasier a lot and I appreciate their respective endings. I think there are important messages to glean from both, even if on the surface (and for Cheers especially) it may seem lame. But representing parallel philosophies for how a sitcom can end, they jointly sum up the breadth of the genre’s appeal. Whether in affirming comfort (where everybody knows your name) or moving on from it (Frasier has left the building) they emphasize that it mattered. And it still does.
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