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How Kirstie Alley saved Cheers from closure

Ted Danson and Kirstie Alley in Cheers - Getty
Ted Danson and Kirstie Alley in Cheers - Getty

Joining one of the most successful sitcoms ever made after a main character has departed is always a tricky thing to do. But assuming the lead female role after another performer has created one of the most iconic figures on television is a nigh-on impossible task.

It is to the enduring credit of Kirstie Alley, who has died of cancer at the age of 71, that when she became part of Glen and Les Charles’s show Cheers in 1987, playing the imperious bar manager Rebecca Howe, she managed to dispel memories of Shelley Long’s Diane Chambers with a mixture of superb comic timing, ineffable screen presence and a cleverly handled character arc. Rebecca, in Alley’s performance, belied her initial façade of competence and efficiency to become as memorable – and eccentric – as the rest of the finely honed ensemble, and attracted great acclaim in the process.

The particular challenge that she faced when she joined the show in its sixth season was how to erase memories of Long, who had created one of television’s most memorable "Will they, won’t they" romantic dynamics with Ted Danson’s bartender Sam Malone. The previous relationship between the two characters – Malone being uneducated, a womaniser and a recovering alcoholic, and Diane a university-educated waitress with literary ambitions – may have drawn on everything from Shakespeare to Noel Coward for its antecedents.

But the freshness that both Danson and Long brought to their parts meant that, for many viewers, Cheers was the Sam and Diane show. When Long left at the end of the fifth season, in order to pursue a film career, the Charles brothers were faced with a near-existential problem: how can you replace Diane, and still keep the show fresh and funny?

The answer came in the form of Alley, who, in 1987, was best known for her performances in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, as Spock’s Vulcan protegee Lieutent Saavik and in the American Civil War drama North and South. The only real hint at her comic abilities came from the successful comedy Summer School, released the same year that she joined Cheers; she played a history teacher and the object of the protagonist’s initially rebuffed affections. But her casting was still something of a gamble for the show.

The writers and producers deliberately cast someone who would be the physical opposite of Long, and also a fresh face for viewers. It soon worked. Although Rebecca Howe could never fully erase memories of Diane, she became an iconic character in her own right, given both nuance and comic brio through Alley’s multi-faceted performance.

Her first appearance, in the sixth season’s opener ‘Home is the Sailor’, introduced her as the new female lead and manager of the bar, who initially came across as a hyper-focused career woman, but soon revealed herself to be ditzy, man-hungry and profoundly insecure. The show’s director commented of her casting that “we thought of the part as a martinet, a bitch. Then we met [Alley] and there was this vulnerability, so we made her the neurotic woman of the 1980s.”

Alley herself remarked, when she was cast, that “Rebecca has made a lot of mistakes in the corporate structure. She's going to be fired by the corporation, unless she handles Sam's bar correctly. She's not a ditz, but she has a neurotic side. She's volatile and eccentric, so when she loses it emotionally, she really loses it. She's either strong and in control or way out there.” This was then doubled down upon, to often hilarious effect.

Kirstie Alley and Ted Danson in Cheers - Getty
Kirstie Alley and Ted Danson in Cheers - Getty

While the character’s penchant for throwing herself at the wealthy men of Boston has not dated well today – much the same could be said of the sexual politics of the show generally, in particular Danson’s character’s largely unquestioned lecherous ways – she was nonetheless able to adapt to the shifting ideas that the writers brought to Rebecca’s portrayal. One of the show’s creators, Ken Levine, commented that “In one episode though, she had to fall apart for some reason and was hysterical. We realised that the more neurotic, insecure, and sexually frustrated she was – the funnier she was. So the character evolved in that direction.”

A typical Rebecca moment was her announcing “I tried that positive thinking stuff, and I knew it wouldn’t work and sure enough it didn’t!” Alley’s skill at delivering such gags resulted in her winning an Emmy and a Golden Globe in 1991; she was also nominated for several more.

It was notable that, unlike the "will they-won’t they" dynamic between Danson and Long, Alley’s character remained amicably antagonistic towards Sam throughout, despite their briefly getting together in the 10th season; this made for a more compelling and amusing partnership.

At its peak, Cheers was so popular that it was rumoured that the then-President Bill Clinton was keen to appear in a cameo in the show’s finale, One For the Road, although he eventually pulled out. (“Hillary’s father passed away, so it wouldn’t look very good if he popped up on Cheers,” Alley reasoned.) Even without Clinton, the final episode was watched by 93 million people in the US alone.

Alley didn't much want Cheers to come to an end; the show paid her $3 million a year. As she quipped to David Letterman: “It’s ending because Ted is old…his hands aren’t steady any more, he can’t pour those drinks.” She would happily have carried on with the role, semi-jokingly suggesting that she wished for a final mini-season of half a dozen shows to wrap up the narrative satisfactorily but claimed that her attempts to pitch the idea were stymied by her breaking down in tears in front of her colleagues, an experience she described as “really degrading”.

Once the show was over, she told Letterman that her ambition was to become “a cross between an interior designer and a spiritual advisor for wayward actresses who just don’t know what’s going on”. The particular “wayward actress” who she singled out was Sharon Stone, then at the peak of her Basic Instinct fame: an indicator that Alley was uninterested in being diplomatic or playing the Hollywood game.

She did not appear on the Cheers spin-off Frasier – the only member of the cast not to do so – reportedly because her Scientology faith meant that she was opposed to any show that promoted psychiatry, which Scientologists refuse to believe in. (David Lee, the show’s co-creator and executive producer, only commented that “I don’t recall asking [her]” when he was asked whether he would have liked Alley to make a guest appearance on the show.) Her character was referred to briefly in the episode in which Danson made a cameo as Sam. It was said of Rebecca that she was back at the bar, and when Frasier enquired as to whether she was working there, Sam remarked “No, she’s just back at the bar” –a hint of the ill feeling with which Alley may have been regarded by the Frasier team.

Kirstie Alley as Rebecca Howe - Getty
Kirstie Alley as Rebecca Howe - Getty

Later in life, Alley had well-documented struggles with her weight – which she attempted to exorcise with the 2005 show Fat Actress, in which she appeared as a fictionalised version of herself – and her political views caused some controversy. After initially appearing to be a standard-issue Hollywood Democrat, voting for Obama, she pivoted to become a keen Trump supporter, tweeting in 2020 that “I’m voting for Donald Trump because he’s NOT a politician. I voted for him 4 years ago for this reason and shall vote for him again for this reason. He gets things done quickly and he will turn the economy around quickly. There you have it folks there you have it.” The response of the writer-director Judd Apatow was swift and brutal. “Shelly [sic] Long was way funnier than you.”

Today, Apatow and many others might have cause to eat their words. Alley may be as well-remembered for her outspokenness  - to say nothing of her appearances in the inexplicably popular Look Who’s Talking series – as she was for her performance in Cheers. But it takes remarkable skill to create a character as memorable as Rebecca Howe and to push back against the hints of misogyny and sexism in her creation.

It helped that she could deliver the best jokes perfectly: it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at her reading of such lines as “The nerve of that man saying I have an emotional problem. I’d like to meet him in a dark alley with a cleaver!”