Any situation comedy worth its salt — let alone its ratings — relies on ensemble. Viewers wouldn’t have loved “I Love Lucy” if Fred and Ethel hadn’t been around to keep Lucy and Ricky company. On “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” Mary basically played straight man (or woman) to Lou and Murray and Ted and Georgette and Sue Ann. “The Larry Sanders Show” without Hank, Artie, and company would have been “The Larry Sanders Soliloquy.” That could have been pretty funny, actually, but it wouldn’t have been the sublime enterprise that Garry Shandling bestowed on an unsuspecting HBO.
Any consideration of ensemble-driven sitcoms has to include “Cheers,” and any consideration of “Cheers” has to include George Wendt, whose Norm Peterson was the bar fly’s bar fly. Considering Norm’s bulk, bar bear would be a more accurate description.
Wendt died Tuesday. He was 76.
Oak-like and imperturbable, Norm was the still point in that madly turning barroom. Around him Sam and Diane (succeeded by Rebecca) and Coach (succeeded by Woody) and Carla and Cliff and Frasier and the rest variously hopped, skipped, and jumped. Planted on a barstool, Norm didn’t so much look plausible as inevitable. He seemed like part of the décor. The most memorable performances transcend acting to resemble being. Wendt as Norm easily qualifies.
With Norm, all that “Cheers” nonsense about “where everyone knows your name” never mattered. One look at him, named or anonymous, and this was a guy you knew. That audience recognition was a better honor than any of the six Emmy nominations for best supporting actor that Wendt earned.
“Cheers” ran for 11 seasons, but did the series ever top the couple of minutes in its first season where House Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill Jr. made a cameo appearance as himself? More to the point, did it ever top the sight of Speaker Tip and tippler Norm seated side by side at the bar? It just felt so right.
“Cheers” slingshot a whole bunch of careers: most notably those of Ted Danson, leading to multiple TV series; Kelsey Grammer, leading to “Frasier”; Woody Harrelson, leading to movie stardom (who’da thunk it?); and John Ratzenberger, as Pixar vocal talisman. Wendt kept regularly working after “Cheers,” but probably his most notable subsequent credit was being Jason Sudeikis’s real-life uncle. (His sister is Sudeikis’s mother.) That’s OK. It’s hard to imagine an achievement that might have surpassed doing justice to the matter-of-fact monumentality of Norm Peterson.
Mark Feeney is a Globe arts writer.
NBC’s embrace of sports could be bad news for scripted programmingAn empty bar stool, a mug of beer, a candle. Cheers in Boston mourns ‘Norm’ actor George Wendt.
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