Ted Danson has said that he first thought being paired with Cheers co-star Shelley Long was a “bad idea.”
The actor, 76, played womanizer Sam Malone on the Emmy award-winning sitcom—an ex-Boston Red Sox baseball player who owned a bar called “Cheers.” Long, meanwhile, portrayed Diane Chambers, the main protagonist on the series who had an on-and-off romance with Malone.
On Monday’s episode of the SmartLess podcast, hosted by Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett, The Good Place star spoke candidly about his initial hesitation with Long, 75.
“You and Shelley had the most incredible sitcom chemistry,” Arnett said, adding that the duo were “magic.”
“It was great,” Danson said. “I am always the worst. My first reaction to Shelley while we were auditioning was, ‘Oh, no. No. That’s a bad, bad idea.'”
When Danson was asked why, the Golden Globe Award winner said: “I just, I don’t know.”
“We’re so different—our styles, our approach, our everything is really different, which is why I think it worked,” he said. “Because it was like this fair fight, right?”
Ted Danson and Shelley Long smile onstage at the 2006 TV Land Awards at the Barker Hangar on March 19, 2006 in Santa Monica, California. The actor recently revealed on a new episode of “SmartLess” that he initially thought being paired with the actress on “Cheers” was a “bad idea.”
Kevin Winter/Getty Images
Cheers ran for 11 seasons from 1982 to 1993 and had 275 episodes. While Danson was on the show for its entire run, Long left in 1987 to turn her attention to movies and her family. Kirstie Alley replaced Long’s character.
“It was hard for us sometimes to be in the room together, but when we started working, it was just fantastic,” Danson added on the podcast episode, “because you’d smack her and she’d smack you back harder. It was just brilliant.”
During an appearance on the Australian show Where Are They Now in 2007, Long said Danson was “a delight to work with,” but she “didn’t want to keep doing the same episode over and over again and the same story.”
“It had been such a fresh and vital experience for me. I didn’t want it to become old and stale,” Long said at the time, but added she missed her co-stars. “I did miss them. I missed them very much. You know, working at Cheers was a dream come true. It truly was. And it was one of the most satisfying experiences of my life. So, yes, I missed it, but I never regretted that decision.”
Newsweek reached out to Long’s representative via email for comment.
On SmartLess, Danson said he never envisioned having such a successful sitcom career, adding that acting never even crossed his mind until he was at college.
“I didn’t think about it until Stanford and then I discovered acting and I was just, life made sense,” Danson added. “I was not an academic. I came from, like, scientific people in my family—my father, my sister was incredibly bright, and I just faked my way through school.”
