Last summer, I visited Boston. The city of the Celtics, tea parties – the like, sane kind, way more colleges than you thought possible, Dunkin’ Donuts, the Irish and, apparently best of all, the “Cheers” bar. For those of you that don’t know – which is probably most – “Cheers” was a sitcom that aired from 1982 to 1993 about a group of Bostonians that liked to hang out in a bar. While the show was filmed on the Paramount lot here in Los Angeles, the dive that inspired the iconic set was an active business in Beantown.
I’m telling you this because my parents really, really wanted to go to the “Cheers” bar. Like, maybe more than they wanted to go to Bunker Hill or Fenway Park. It was a religious pilgrimage for them.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a cool place and the food is fine. But to them, this was heaven. They knew the show’s catchphrases, swapped inside jokes – my mom even admitted to styling her fashion sense after some of the female characters. Needless to say, the magic was lost on me.
It was a chasm that couldn’t really be bridged, mainly because I had never seen an episode of “Cheers” in my life. Nor, really, would I probably ever get the chance to. When my parents talked about classic movies – think “Chinatown” or “Butch Cassidy” – I could digest those, understand their brilliance and catch the same fever in a one to two-hour sitting. Movies are condensed.
With TV, the job gets exponentially harder. Sure, it’s possible to purchase DVD box sets and catch up, but that’s usually a more lengthy endeavor, and not many shows have complete sets. You might catch a few episodes on TV Land or Nick at Nite, but those don’t really do it justice. Only recently has just the right service developed to deliver where DVDs and re-runs have failed: Netflix.
Thanks to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, HBO GO, and I guess Yahoo now, there are now easily accessible archives of these shows that can be gulped in one sitting. If I were ever to visit, say, the restaurant that served as the front for Los Pollos Hermanos, there’s a high probability that my kids will have been able to watch and understand the beauty behind “Breaking Bad” better than I will ever understand “Cheers.”
The ability to binge-watch is key. On TV, the plot and the details don’t matter so much as the viewer’s relationship with the characters. There doesn’t seem to be a definitive moment that “Breaking Bad’s” Walter White turns evil – the infamous “Say My Name” scene is probably the closest thing – but over the course of five seasons, it’s possible to debate the merits of a number of morally corrosive events that causes the spiral. It was because we liked Walter, Saul and Jesse that we kept coming back. We had a vested interest.
Essentially, what we’re about to see is a greater recognition of television as an art form. In fact, it may have already started. Before this golden age, does anyone really think it’s possible that movie stars like Kevin Spacey or Matthew McConaughey would commit to the small screen? Probably not.
We’re in a new era now. Who knows, maybe I’ll even get a chance to watch “Cheers.”