After nearly four decades, what is there new to say about the pilot of Cheers – widely regarded as one of the best television pilots ever made?
We can tick through the Standard Series Facts™ pretty quickly. Sam Malone was originally going to be an NFL player, until Ted Danson was cast. John Ratzenberger originally auditioned for the part of Norm. Before they decided on a bar in Boston, the initial idea was for a show set in a hotel. And you probably know what George Wendt is actually drinking at the bar, right?
If we dig a little deeper, however, we come across the strange tale of Mrs. Littlefield. A character scripted, cast, and shot for the pilot… but cut before air. Well, mostly cut, anyway.
Let’s find out a little about her from Sam Simon, writer and producer on Cheers1:
“There was another regular that was cut out of the pilot, did you know that? Boston is a very racist town, and there was an old woman in a wheelchair, whose name I don’t remember. I think you can see her in the pilot, in the first episode, I should say, because it wasn’t a pilot.2 They wanted to do the reality of Boston a little bit, and the racism of the town is certainly a valid topic for comment.”
Sam Simon, Television Academy Interview (49:24 – 50:05)
Then there’s this reader question on Ken Levine’s blog, another writer and producer on Cheers3:
“In Sam Simon’s amazing Emmy TV Legends interview, he talks about a character that was cut out of the Cheers pilot: A racist woman in a wheelchair. She was supposed to be a regular character, but apparently the Charles Bros/Burrows agreed that her harshness didn’t gel with the rest of the show.
Do you know anything about this?
Yes. The character was named Mrs. Littlefield. She was an opinionated old broad from the D.A.R.4 She was in the pilot and the decision to drop the character was made after it was filmed. Politics just didn’t fit with the mix. So they cut out her part, but there are a few shots here and there where she is still in the background. Just look for a sweet white-haired little old lady who used to have lines.
Since several back-up scripts were in the works before the pilot was filmed, we also had to go back and write her out of those episodes as well.
Again, it was a case of an actor being let go not because they gave a bad performance or did anything wrong. It’s just that the character didn’t mesh with the others.”
Ken Levine, Friday Questions (3rd January 2014)
Sure enough, if we go looking for her, we can indeed see Mrs. Littlefield in her wheelchair throughout the pilot:
All of which is fascinating. But what nobody has done – at least as far as I can tell – is examine the original script of the pilot, and written about what Mrs. Littlefield actually said. But surely that script wouldn’t be readily available online…
Oh, hello. Final Draft, dated 16th April 1982. And it contains all of Mrs. Littlefield’s dialogue, every single line of which was edited out of the final episode.
Let’s take a look, shall we?
Among a million and one other things ↩
You may note that I’m ignoring Sam Simon here, and refer to the first episode as the pilot throughout this article. I don’t know exactly why he doesn’t class it as a pilot; the episode was shot a few months before the rest of Season 1, as detailed here. Many other people who worked on the show refer to it as the pilot, so I’m going to follow their lead. ↩
Among two million and one other things. ↩