Re Ted Danson/Cheers from the book 'The Sweeps'
Cjheers
Eventually, the search centered on three pairs for the two roles. One pair consisted of William Devane, the film actor who had appeared briefly on TV in the series From Here to Eternity —and in the miniseries that had spawned the show—coupled with Lisa Eichhorn, a star of Yanks and other movies. This pair was the “name” duo, who could be expected to bring an instant audience to the show through their reputations.
The second team was Fred Dryer and Julia Duffy, and the third was Ted Danson and Shelley Long. Ted Danson, a tall, good-looking thirty-three-year-old with swept-back Jack Kennedy hair and a proven store of talent for comedy and character roles, had not been in any NBC projects since the latter part of the 1970s, when he had landed on the blacklist of former NBC President Fred Silverman, the only man in TV history ever to control programming at all three networks.
Silverman, once called the man with the golden gut because of his uncanny ability to spot hit shows, had fallen from grace at NBC, the last of his network roosts, when his golden gut suddenly seemed to sour. One of the pilots he’d commissioned during the darkening days of his final network presidency was called Allison Sidney Harrison, which starred Ted Danson as a father who enlists his young daughter in private-eye perils. The pilot fared poorly, and Silverman blamed Danson, partially because testing surveys showed that audiences didn’t find Danson sympathetic. “How could the audience like him?” said another NBC executive. “He was sending his little girl out to chase guys with guns!” Nevertheless, the pilot grabbed Danson’s career momentum like a hydraulic brake. By 1981, though, Silverman and his blacklist were gone, and Ted Danson was the secret favorite of the Cheers producers in the contest for the show’s male lead.
By
Paul Raven ·
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