Cheers, Season Ten. It’s starting to get weaker…out today. (7/10)
Don’t get me wrong. Cheers was always great. And season 10 contains some of the classic episodes the world has come to know and love. Like the one where Sam, Cliff, Norm and Fraser go on a road trip to find their inner manliness, or the one where Norm and Cliff ruin Fraser’s therapy group. Every actor is totally comfortable in their role, by this time they can do it in their sleep, and on occasion it seems as though they are. But the indications that Cheers was nearing it’s end were there throughout the season. And mainly, that’s as a result of the theme throughout the season where Sam and Rebecca decide to conceive a baby.
Not that the lame idea of the formerly promiscuous bartender and the uptight gold-digging whiner trying to have a child together can being down the entire series. It can’t. Cheers was just too good, and Norm and Cliff and Woody and Fraser and Carla and even Paul and Lilith made the series great regardless of the subject. But where, in an earlier season, Sam’s romance with Diane was clearly going to be a fleeting one and was easily dismissed as Sam went back to his old ways, this time we feel as though it’s one of those will-they-or-won’t-they plots that could go on forever. Like that Rachel and Ross thing that made Friends suck so very much. Cheers is still hilarious, still way better than Friends, but Season Ten was the beginning of the end. It comes out today, September 2nd, from Paramount Home Entertainment.