Television shows have been crossing over since the medium’s early days when Superman (George Reeves) flew into a 1957 episode of I Love Lucy. And while there have been countless others (most recently, January’s Abbott Elementary/It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia crossover), one of the strangest was a genre bending occurrence on March 27, 1985 when characters from NBC’s sitcom Cheers turned up on an episode of medical drama, St. Elsewhere.
The St. Elsewhere episode, appropriately titled “Cheers,” featured St. Eligius doctors compassionate Donald Westphall (Ed Flanders), understanding Daniel Auschlander (Norman Lloyd) and testy Mark Craig (William Daniels) meeting up at the bar where everybody knows your name to talk over their respective life woes. Westphall was having doubts about his future, Auschlander’s wife (Jane Wyatt) was in the hospital after a heart attack and Craig was devastated to reunite with his medical mentor, Dr. David Domedion (Dean Jagger), only to find him afflicted with dementia and not remembering him.
The Cheers cast members appearing were snarky waitress Carla Tortelli (Rhea Perlman), who shares her less-than-flattering opinion of St. Eligius with the doctors, boastful mailman Cliff Clavin (John Ratzenberger), who seeks free medical advice, and loveable accountant Norm Peterson (George Wendt), who apparently cost Auschlander a lot of money with a badly done tax return in the past.
While both series premiered on NBC in 1982 and were ratings challenged in their freshman seasons, their respective trajectories couldn’t be more different. Both were critical darlings but Cheers eventually caught the attention of audiences to rank in TV’s top ten for eight of its eleven seasons, while St. Elsewhere was on the cancellation bubble all of its six seasons. Cheers was a typical sitcom with the rare dramatic moment, while St. Elsewhere was primarily a drama that frequently leaned into comedic characters and stories so you’d be laughing one moment, then crying the next.
In short, the shows were not the most likely to even think of for a crossover but was this an attempt to bring some of the larger Cheers audience to St. Elsewhere? How was it decided who from each show would appear? What were the biggest challenges in filming on the Cheers set?
For all these answers and more we checked in with the show’s producer Tom Fontana, who co-wrote the crossover episode with John Masius and John Tinker, to find out everything about how it all came together.
Television Academy: Where did the idea come from this crossover?
Tom Fontana: Obviously, both shows were set in Boston, so that was number one. They did an episode of Cheers [1983’s “Little Sister, Don’t Cha”] where Carla was having another baby and she [is taken] to St. Eligius. All of the writers on St. Elsewhere were devoted to Cheers, and so we were like, ‘Hey, why don't we try to do this?’
The other bonding thing between our two shows was we both premiered the same season [1982-83]. At the time, there were only a hundred series on television. In the ratings that year, St. Elsewhere was 99th, and Cheers was the lowest — it was 100. And the fact that NBC was either smart enough or dumb enough to pick both shows up, that also made us feel a great kinship for the people who worked on Cheers.
But, by the time of the crossover in both shows’ third seasons, Cheers was doing very well in the ratings. Was this the network wanting St. Elsewhere to hitch itself to Cheers wagon?
We were still the ugly sister, but we were fine with that because NBC started ignoring us and we started ignoring the ratings, so we kind of just started doing whatever the hell we wanted. But, no, it was really a creative decision.
The thing about doing a hospital show is you realize very quickly that there are two scenes. There's one scene you have to write in every episode with the patient in his or her room, and the doctor comes in and says, "this is what you have and you're going to live" or "this is what you have and you're gonna die." It's very boring to write that scene at least once a week. We were literally trying to figure out how to just keep the show going.
And [we were], in part, inspired by the brilliance of M*A*S*H — because they never seemed to give a hoot about their format — we would say things like, "let's just do a whole act in the Cheers bar." It wasn't a huge thing because we had already been screwing around with our format by that point to cause trouble.
ABOVE: The cast of St. Elsewhere (Photo courtesy of NBC)
Do you remember at all the discussions about who from each show would appear in the Cheers scenes?
We knew we wanted it to be Westphall, Craig and Auschlander, because we thought William Daniels interacting with the Cheers characters would automatically be funny. From Cheers, first of all, Nicholas Colasanto (Coach) was not doing well and we were told they didn’t want to strain him, though he stopped by [during filming], which made us feel like, "oh, God, I guess we should have put him in." I think we just thought it would be funnier to have it be Carla, Cliff and Norm.
At one point, Carla rattles off why Sam, Diane, Coach weren’t in the bar. Was that something you guys felt was necessary to include?
Yeah, definitely. Obviously, those characters were major characters on the show. Now that we're talking about it, I think the other thought was that we wouldn't have been able to service all of the characters so we thought those three would be the best to interact with our three.
Did you talk to the Cheers writers to make sure you had the voices right for those characters?
I think we thought we knew them well enough. That's my memory of it. Bruce Paltrow directed the episode, he may have run the script by [Cheers EP] James Burrows or somebody over there, but it's not like we got notes.
What were some of the challenges that came with pulling this off?
The complication was St. Elsewhere was an MTM [Enterprises] show and Cheers was Paramount, so MTM had to rent the set because we had to shoot it over there. There was this negotiation with two major superpowers. We were amazed that they ended up agreeing to let us do it. We also had to shoot it on a day that Cheers wasn't working, but we still needed some of their crew there because — even though we brought over our [director of photography] and script supervisor — somebody had to turn on the lights. It was a complicated thing to pull off. I know that we thought, "maybe this will never happen," and then they managed to make it happen.
Was it just one day of shooting or did it take more time than that?
Yeah, yeah, it was. It was pretty much like a play in the sense that we just shot it, but we were only there a day.
It’s a little jarring since, if you were a Cheers watcher, you’d be used to laughter, but there was no laugh track on St. Elsewhere. Was adding a laugh track for those scenes ever discussed?
Yeah, it would have been too weird. The other thing, from a directing point of view, because they had no other wall — their audience was the fourth wall. So Bruce had to shoot it all and it was a real complication for him because he had to figure out a way to shoot the scenes without doing the reverse. But he figured it out. Bruce was talented at being able to pull that off.
Do you remember physically being on the Cheers set?
Oh, yeah. You think I would have missed that? Everyone was very, very sweet to us, all the actors. I also remember George Wendt, when we were done, came up to me and he goes, "Oh, I feel so terrible." And I go, "Why?" And he goes, "Because now I'll never get to play a different character on St. Elsewhere." We had a rule [on St. Elsewhere] that could not be broken, that once a character was on the show, that that actor had to play that character forever.
Important question: Did you get a picture behind the Cheers bar?
You know what? I don't think I did. What an idiot I was. You know, at the MTM lot was where they shot Lassie, so I have a photo taken of me at Lassie’s farmhouse porch. And that's also where the lagoon from Gilligan's Island was. John Masius, one of the other St. Elsewhere writer/producers, we wrote an episode where Ed Begley's character, Dr. Victor Ehrlich, had a dream that he was lost on a desert island and they literally refilled Gilligan's lagoon for the episode. There's a photo of me standing in the middle of Gilligan's lagoon. At least I had the presence of mind to do those but I'll have to time travel to get the Cheers photo.
Social media wasn’t around then, obviously, but what was the reaction from the crossover once it aired? It was the St. Elsewhere season three finale.
With everything we did that was any kind of groundbreaking experimental thing, there were people that loved it and people that hated it. So I can say that with some confidence because any time we stepped off the mark, people would react.
The legacy of St. Elsewhere has lived on since it became a regular thing to have characters or names pop up on other shows, like Alfre Woodard’s Dr. Roxanne Turner ended up in an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street years after St. Elsewhere was off the air.
If you can find it, somewhere on the Internet, somebody actually created a kind of family tree, with all the shows that are connected by growing out of a mention or a character on St. Elsewhere. It's a massive thing called "The Tommy Westphall Universe" and I think it goes all the way back to I Love Lucy. It's mind boggling. For me, the most mind boggling thing was who had the time to sit and do this?
But I'm thrilled that you liked the crossover episode and St. Elsewhere. I literally haven't thought about it in 40 years, but it was an enormous amount of fun. I literally was like a kid at Disneyland. I was so happy to be on that set and working with those actors.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Cheers is now streaming on Paramount+. St. Elsewhere is now streaming on Hulu.
