Season One Ep 15 Father Knows Last

December 22, 2019

Cliff: Hey, listen..if you need a trois for that menage, I'll be in the bar! (no Norm entrance this week)

Carla's third trimester-level large with child, but somehow no one at Cheers feels comfy addressing the elephant in the room, until Sam finally encourages her to share the happy-ish news. Shelley Long's (mostly) hidden pregnancy didn't fit Diane's story, but Carla was poppin' 'em out like Pez, so Perlman's three kids all made their prenatal TV debuts on Cheers. Carla pins paternity on Marshall, the lovable nerd who gave Coach and Sam the hot Celtics tip in the previous episode (also written by Rhea's talented sister, Heide Perlman). Marshall's ready to dive into fatherhood, and certainly financially stable enough to take on the whole Tortelli tribe, but Diane smells a rat when he mentions he and Carla only ever 'dated' the one time, and Carla's actually pretty pleased with herself when Diane confronts her. Maybe it's the smug manner in which she's munching on a big ol' pickle, or the cold way she confesses, "I lied so he'd support it", but Diane straight up assaults Carla, and it's hard to say how the scrap might've ended since they cut to commercial. If only real life could break for ads!

Carla admits that her ex--the as-yet unseen Nick (Dan Hedaya)--is the father as he caught her in a moment of weakness with his patented ear lobe nibbling method. Given the glaring cut mid-nibble, the whole scene was too hot for TV in '83, but Carla demonstrates the move on Diane when Cliff saunters on in and has his brain blown wide open. John Ratzenberger gets a lot of credit for Cliff's know-it-all schtick, but he's an underrated 're-actor', and his reaction here is priceless. Cliff assures them it's all good--"I'm an eighties kinda guy, uh, seen all the right movies and everything..." in spite of Carla and Diane insisting the whole thing was purely in the interest of science. Everything Cliff says and does in the episode after this is sheer genius!

Marshall takes the truth well enough, but--like most Cheers guests--we never see him again. And it soon becomes apparent to Diane that she should walk a mile in Carla's Nike sneakers before she judges. Carla's single with a deadbeat ex and more kids than she can already handle, so the gang take up a collection for mother and child and Diane leads the whole dang bar in a rousing rendition of You'll Never Walk Alone while Carla proudly marches out, pitcher full of money in hand! Viva variety, but I kinda miss the days when pop culture was a little less diffuse and everyone knew the same songs. If I had to guess the one song almost everyone under fifty knows now, it's Quincy Jones' Fresh Prince theme song, Yo Home to Bel-Air!

Guest Stars

Besides Mark King as Marshall, who was covered in last week's blog, here we get this funny bit (vid below) from Herb Mitchell and Mary Ellen Trainor. Trainor makes her debut here and went on to play supporting parts in everything from The Goonies to Die Hard and Lethal Weapon 1-4. Former stockbroker/jazz club owner, Mitchell did alright as well, in a long career in the theater and onscreen, recurring on Private Practice and playing Tevye in three productions of Fiddler ON The Roof, spanning 1971-2006.

Stray Thought

Sam's mythic little black book makes its first appearance here, and it looks way less little in Diane's hands. I dunno if Long's got dainty dukes or Danson's got mammoth mitts. Both.

Trivia

I stole two oddly random bits of rock-related trivia from imdb...This episode debuted January 20th, the same day KISS's Paul Stanley turned 31, and Def Leppard released the towering Pyromania. Maybe I'm just an old fuddy-duddy, but the month of January alone had more great albums drop than all of 2019...besides Pyromania, other January '83 releases include Eurythmics' Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), Bryan Adams' Cuts Like a Knife, Nena's self-titled debut, Malcolm McClaren's Duck Rock, and seminal albums from The Stranglers, Randy Newman, Christopher Cross, Minutemen, Soft Cell and more. Crazy! Oh, hell, here's a shoulda-been smash from Nena:

That chorus is unstoppable! A big hit in Germany that somehow flopped harder than Baywatch Nights over here

'Tis the season for Christmas tunes, so here's five faves that'll make no sense to anyone reading this in any other month:

Only one song from the last forty years attains Christmas standard status for me, and this is it. Not just a seasonal favorite, but a stunning marriage of music and lyric!