The American sitcom Cheers depicted a Boston bar where everybody knew your name, and its most loyal customer, Norm Peterson, was the character practically everybody wanted to be.
Norm, played by George Wendt in all the show’s episodes from 1982 to 1993, and who died on Tuesday aged 76, was the ultimate bar-fly, the role model for those who used to haunt bars and pubs, and for many who still do. This cuddly, ursine and somewhat shambolic character was held in affection by viewers and all in the fictional drinking-hole – he was greeted upon his arrival with the universal salutation, ‘Norm!’ – mostly because he was just consistently funny. He would deploy killer responses to routine enquiries: ‘What’d you like, Normie?’ ‘A reason to live. Give me another beer.’ And despite an evident over-fondness for the drink, he rarely got drunk.
If his sardonic replies and lugubrious disposition betrayed an obvious disappointment with life, that made him all the more endearing. Nominally an accountant, but listless by nature, he ended up drifting into work as a part-time painter and decorator. He also neglected his wife, Vera, someone he was at pains to avoid seeing, and a character we never even got to see.
When Wendt auditioned for the role, as he later recalled, his character was originally to be decidedly marginal. ‘My agent said. “It’s a small role, honey. It’s one line. Actually, it’s one word.” The word was “beer”.’ Little could Wendt know that he was to fill the role of an everyman archetype, elaborate on it, and bring it to a global audience.
Norm embodied a fallen soul in a bar that abounded in failures, misfits and people with broken dreams. Sam Malone was the ageing lothario and recovering alcoholic who couldn’t even remember the tail-end of his baseball career. Diane Chambers was a superior and pretentious graduate reduced to a common barmaid. Cliff Clavin was a grating know-it-all who lived with his mother. Carla Tortelli always chose bad guys. Rebecca Howe was a neurotic gold-digger. The oddball barmen Coach and Woody were variants on a different archetype: the idiot savant. And the show’s longest-lasting character, Frasier Crane, was an egg-head who knew how to sort out everyone’s personal problems – except his own.
Norm Peterson endeared and has endured, as has Cheers. Channel 4 has been repeating the series on a seeming loop for years first thing in the morning. He and the sitcom still appeal because the best comedy often portray characters who are imperfect, that is to say, like us.
Consider our counterparts in Britain. Basil Fawlty and Edmund Blackadder were both frustrated lower-middle class types, the former whose aspirations to climb the social ladder always result in disaster, the latter whose hopes of betterment or escape are dashed by a clueless prole, or a gormless prince or upper-class twit. There was Alan Partridge, the fallen chat-show host who becomes increasingly bitter and mad as his personal life and career both fall to pieces. David Brent was an equally sad, if more sympathetic, character from the outset, but he was similarly doomed by his appalling social skills and inability to read people.
The Office and I’m Alan Partridge both seemed to embody a quintessentially British type of humour: dead-pan, pessimistic, class-orientated, glorying in the failures of others. If we extend this stereotype, one might expect characters in American comedy to personify the spirit of that nation: upbeat, optimistic, crass, lacking humour but always laughing.
But Norm Peterson, and Cheers, told us otherwise: the show reminded us that Americans also like their comedy icons to be amiable failures. In its spin-off Frasier, we were introduced first to Niles, who also had a miserable marriage, and whose wife, Maris, we also never see, and then to Frasier’s radio producer Roz Doyle, the nymphomaniac who lives in the forlorn hope of finding her ideal man.
Norm embodied a fallen soul in a bar
Imperfect and dubious protagonists abound in American TV comedy, most conspicuously in that the loveable person but terrible role model and husband, Homer Simpson. It even extended to Friends. Despite its bright, cheery appearance and upbeat patter, Friends always returned to themes of unhappy childhoods, disappointing fathers, unrealised ambition and failed relationships. The clue was in the opening lines of its theme tune: ‘So no one told you life was gonna be this way…’
The characters at Cheers had already told us as much: life rarely works out as you had hoped. That’s why people took to Norm, and are grateful for George Wendt for bringing him to life. And perhaps we need him more than ever now. In our age of social media envy and Instagram mystification that reinforces the myth that our lives should be perfect, we ought to cherish the likes of Norm Peterson, because they bring us back down to earth.
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