Glen and Les Charles spent so much time casting their hit sitcom Cheers that they eventually took the lines used in the many auditions out of the script altogether. It was a long, drawn-out process, during which they got sick of their own dialogue. Some decisions were easier than others: The Charleses knew they wanted Rhea Perlman to play Carla and George Wendt to play Norm early—they previously worked with Wendt on Taxi. John Ratzenberger as Cliff was also an easy choice, but settling on the leads wasn’t quite as simple.
NBC had a pretty clear idea of who they thought should star as Sam Malone, and that suggestion was Bill Cosby. He was interested in returning to TV after playing the lead in other shows. The Charles brothers were in agreement that the show would’ve inevitably turned out to be The Bill Cosby Show if they’d gone along with the network’s plan. They also knew it would’ve been a totally different show than it ended up being on top of that.
Needless to say, they weren’t interested in going that route. The principle the producers adopted during casting was to choose unknown performers. Somebody told them never to have an actor’s name in the title of one of their shows, the reason being that you can’t fire them under the circumstances—or at least that was the case up until it happened to Roseanne Barr. At the end of the day, Cosby didn’t feel right to them, and the choice not to use him wasn’t met with much resistance.
Ted Danson still wasn’t cast right away, and the Charleses were considering Knots Landing star William Devane at the same time. The problem they had with Danson was that, although he looked like a leading man, he came across to them as more of a character actor. They took a look at his earlier movie Body Heat, in which he played a tap dancing lawyer, and didn’t get the jock vibes from his performance that they felt were necessary for Sam Malone. When all was said and done, Danson got the role because he had great chemistry with Shelley Long.
Cheers didn’t become an immediate ratings success, but it eventually got there. As fate would have it, placing a series called The Cosby Show ahead of it in the network’s lineup would boost its popularity, which would increase significantly.
