Credit: CBS / YouTube Still
Sun 9 August 2026 21:45, UK
There comes a time in every actor’s life when they need to stick or twist, and when Ted Danson decided to twist, he had every reason to believe that he’d permanently shot himself in the foot.
Three decades after that call, he can safely say that he hasn’t, with the actor still as ubiquitous a presence on the small screen as he’s been since the early 1980s. Sure, he never became a movie star, and his film work in general hasn’t been up to much, but as far as TV stars go, he’s one of the most prominent.
Back in the day, television was viewed as a stepping stone to the big screen, and the opposite was true for the veterans who’d already made their mark on cinema. The two schools of thought used to pass each other in the middle all the time, but the way the medium has evolved, there’s no shame in being a TV guy.
As far as TV guys go, Danson is one of the modern era’s best, but he wasn’t sure what came next when he made the bold decision in early 1993 to inform the showrunners of Cheers that he was done, and that his 11th season as Sam Malone would be his last. When he broke the news, the creative team was stunned.
“Ted’s edict to us caught us by surprise,” co-creator James Burrows admitted. “When Ted said he wanted to go, I remember the house I was in, I remember talking to the boys, and we talked about whether we could continue, could we go on, and we thought that Sam Malone and Cheers were too symbiotic to go on.”
The hit sitcom had survived Shelley Long’s departure, but the brain trust in charge of the show knew that without Danson, there was no point. Cheers‘ 11th run was refitted to be its last, and having made the biggest decision of his professional life by far, the star had absolutely no idea what came next.
“I don’t really know,” he responded when asked why he’d opted to bail on being one of the highest-paid stars on the box. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. Now you’ve made the decision, and here comes the sadness and the fear. Pick me up out of the gutter next year and interview me, and ask how I feel.”
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
That’s a morbid way of looking at it, but that was the risk, with Danson pointing out that what he was “definitely not doing is leaving the show for the promise of something bigger and better,” and if he didn’t find something bigger and better, sooner rather than later, not to put too fine a point it, he’d be fucked.
The following year, he starred in the mildly successful comedy, Getting Even with Dad, opposite Macaulay Culkin, the abysmal comedy, Pontiac Moon, and voiced his Cheers character in an episode of The Simpsons. The next few were equally lean, too, and after a couple of false starts, it wouldn’t be until Becker premiered in 1998 that he finally got back on track.
