Season One Ep 17 Diane's Perfect Date
Coach: Beer, Norm?
Norm: That's the sudsy amber stuff, right?
Most Cheers guest spots are done in one episode, but Derek McGrath made such an impression here as lovable murderer "Andy-Andy" Schroeder that they brought him back twice more in the Diane years and one last time during the nostalgia-heavy final season. McGrath looks like the kind of guileless open-faced guy you'd set your sister up with on a blind date, so Stephen Kolzak nailed it when he cast Diane's date.
The less-than-perfect date that opens the episode doesn't go so well; Walter (Doug Sheehan) looks right about Diane's preppy speed, but his compulsion to count the number of letters in each sentence would drive anyone nuts. It's a gift and a curse, as Walter's basically incapable of carrying on a normal non-numerical conversation. This screwball setup lends itself beautifully to come classic Cheers banter from sitcom legend David Lloyd with his second Cheers script:
Sam: By the way, Walter...
Walter: Fourteen. Uh, yes, Sam, what is it?
Sam: How was Diane on a scale of a hundred?
Walter: Twenty-nine.
Seriously, David Lloyd was a machine! Paar, Carson, Cavett, 31 episodes of Mary Tyler Moore, 12 Taxi, 15 Frasier, 25 Cheers, and so much more. I bet that guy had some wicked carpal tunnel. Meanwhile, the perennially underemployed Norm peruses the want ads, feeling very unwanted.
Sam teases Diane about the kind of men she dates, and she argues that the gum-snapping "coterie of Betty Boops you squander your time, money, and hormones on" are no better. Sam insists he knows better than Diane the kind of man she needs, and Diane agrees to return the favour when she realizes she knows the perfect woman for Sam. Coach cluelessly plants the notion in Sam's overactive imagination that Sam himself is Diane's perfect date, so he doesn't even bother to find Diane a date, assuming she'll do the same. Sam's mortified when her friend Gretchen (Gretchen Corbett) actually shows, but he thinks fast, grabbing the first guy who walks out of the bathroom and enlisting him to act as his longtime friend for just one date. Andy's game, but he asks, "what if this girl doesn't like me?" and Sam assures him, "That's alright, she doesn't like anybody."
Gretchen's lovely, but far too intelligent for Sam, so their date would probably be a dud anyway if Andy didn't wind up scaring her off first. Andy actually seemed like he might make a decent match until they head off for dinner and he offhandedly mentions he can dine "anywhere but Villa Milano. That's bad memories for me...I killed a waitress there." Turns out Andy's just done ten years for manslaughter, so Sam suggests they double-date rather than leaving Diane with Andy unattended. I was surprised on rewatching to find Andy's on screen for maybe four minutes max, but he makes a big impression, and gets lots more to do in his next appearance. Diane's disgusted that Sam could be so cruel as to set her up with a murderer until Sam admits he misconstrued her intent and assumed Diane would be his "ideal date", and Andy was a last-minute ringer. Diane's touched, coaxing an admission out of Sam that he carries a little torch for her, before they break into a loud childish spat, and it's up to Norm to remind them (and us) that they're having this tiff in a public place. Then we get our first taste of the greek chorus from the bar as they debate Sam and Diane, eventually breaking out into an even rowdier argument over who's crazy about who.
Stray Thought
I might've mentioned this in a previous blog, but Mary Tyler Moore's got me thinking...am I alone in hearing Mimsie the MTM cat's 'mew' in my head at the end of every Cheers episode? Lots of MTM alum worked on/created Cheers, but the show wasn't part of its stable. I put this trick of the mind down to two potential culprits: repeat association with other MTM shows like WKRP in Cincinnati, OR I've entered an alternative universe
Trivia
I think this is the first time we get a look at Sam's pre-date ritual, accompanied in this instance by Norm and Cliff humming a little bullfighter's march.
Guest Stars
- Like a lot of Canadian actors (Gordon Pinsent, Graham Greene, John Vernon...), Derek McGrath's considered more of a character actor south of the border, while consistently playing lead and major supporting roles north of the 49th Parallel. My own personal introduction was TV Ontario's MathMakers:
But he really made an impression playing the bumbling father figure, Dr. Benjamin Jeffcoate, alongside Jerry O'Connell on My Secret Identify which ran for three seasons. But it felt like longer due to endless reruns:
McGrath played bit parts in movies like Mr. Mom and Freaked (featuring Mr. T as The Bearded Lady), and he made his first appearance as "Nichiren Shoshu Member" in Hal Ashby's The Last Detail. Forget Scorsese, Lumet, Allen, Coppola, and the other usual suspects--if you're looking for the filmmaker whose movies defined the '70s, Ashby's your man. Starting with The Landlord in '70 and wrapping the decade on a high note with Being There in '79, the seven films Ashby made in the Me Decade constitute a near-perfect run. I could go on and on, but Bobcat Goldthwait might say it best: "...you know, when I saw Harold and Maude, I didn’t laugh; I was a boy and I just felt like a Starbelly Sneetch finding the other Starbelly Sneetches, you know."
He's no stranger to the stage, but McGrath's mostly known for his work in television, having guested and/or recurred on everything from Newhart to Dallas and Star Trek: Voyager with long runs on Canadian-filmed series like Doc and Little Mosque on the Prairie; he's also kept busy doing voice work on everything from the Inspector Gadget reboot to Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood on PBS. Approaching five decades in the biz, McGrath shows no signs of slowing down, recently reuniting with his old co-star in a guest spot on Jerry O'Connell's Carter earlier this year. In the clip below, McGrath gets to really show his stuff on an oddly old fashioned (even for '85) variety show pilot, The Cracker Brothers, which also starred another recurring Cheers guest, Mark King:
I'm thinking I should just start a Derek McGrath blog, and there's too many clips on youtube I'd love to highlight, but I must stop. After one more clip! Pardon the quiet audio, but here's McGrath at a charity event playing a lovely tune he wrote himself. Watch yer back, Bruce Cockburn!
- Gretchen Corbett plays Sam's date who's also named Gretchen. A busy theatre director and actor, Corbett's likely best known to TV audiences as James Garners' lawyer and on-off girlfriend on The Rockford Files...what was up with all the old dudes hooking up with much younger women on '70s detective shows? Rockford, MacMillan & Wife, Hart to Hart, Mrs. Columbo...they all had age gaps of ten-twenty years between their leading men and ladies. In fact, as a kid, I just assumed Mrs. Columbo (I didn't know the diff between Mrs. and Ms.) was Columbo's daughter, given the 28-year age gap. Peter Falk might've felt weird about it, too, because he never showed up on his TV wife's show.
Corbett's mostly stuck to the stage in recent years, but she still pops up on TV from time to time. Like this recurring character on Portlandia, set in her home town:
- Doug Sheehan plays Walter, Diane's numbers-obsessed date. I'm not sure what he's up to now, but Sheeran was a busy actor through the eighties and nineties, guesting or recurring on shows like TV's Clueless and Macgyver with his last credited appearance on Sabrina, The Teenage Witch in '03.
Thinking of Bruce Cockburn, here's a mid-70s gem from the man himself:
Cheers!
Norm: That's the sudsy amber stuff, right?
Most Cheers guest spots are done in one episode, but Derek McGrath made such an impression here as lovable murderer "Andy-Andy" Schroeder that they brought him back twice more in the Diane years and one last time during the nostalgia-heavy final season. McGrath looks like the kind of guileless open-faced guy you'd set your sister up with on a blind date, so Stephen Kolzak nailed it when he cast Diane's date.
The less-than-perfect date that opens the episode doesn't go so well; Walter (Doug Sheehan) looks right about Diane's preppy speed, but his compulsion to count the number of letters in each sentence would drive anyone nuts. It's a gift and a curse, as Walter's basically incapable of carrying on a normal non-numerical conversation. This screwball setup lends itself beautifully to come classic Cheers banter from sitcom legend David Lloyd with his second Cheers script:
Sam: By the way, Walter...
Walter: Fourteen. Uh, yes, Sam, what is it?
Sam: How was Diane on a scale of a hundred?
Walter: Twenty-nine.
Seriously, David Lloyd was a machine! Paar, Carson, Cavett, 31 episodes of Mary Tyler Moore, 12 Taxi, 15 Frasier, 25 Cheers, and so much more. I bet that guy had some wicked carpal tunnel. Meanwhile, the perennially underemployed Norm peruses the want ads, feeling very unwanted.
Sam teases Diane about the kind of men she dates, and she argues that the gum-snapping "coterie of Betty Boops you squander your time, money, and hormones on" are no better. Sam insists he knows better than Diane the kind of man she needs, and Diane agrees to return the favour when she realizes she knows the perfect woman for Sam. Coach cluelessly plants the notion in Sam's overactive imagination that Sam himself is Diane's perfect date, so he doesn't even bother to find Diane a date, assuming she'll do the same. Sam's mortified when her friend Gretchen (Gretchen Corbett) actually shows, but he thinks fast, grabbing the first guy who walks out of the bathroom and enlisting him to act as his longtime friend for just one date. Andy's game, but he asks, "what if this girl doesn't like me?" and Sam assures him, "That's alright, she doesn't like anybody."
Gretchen's lovely, but far too intelligent for Sam, so their date would probably be a dud anyway if Andy didn't wind up scaring her off first. Andy actually seemed like he might make a decent match until they head off for dinner and he offhandedly mentions he can dine "anywhere but Villa Milano. That's bad memories for me...I killed a waitress there." Turns out Andy's just done ten years for manslaughter, so Sam suggests they double-date rather than leaving Diane with Andy unattended. I was surprised on rewatching to find Andy's on screen for maybe four minutes max, but he makes a big impression, and gets lots more to do in his next appearance. Diane's disgusted that Sam could be so cruel as to set her up with a murderer until Sam admits he misconstrued her intent and assumed Diane would be his "ideal date", and Andy was a last-minute ringer. Diane's touched, coaxing an admission out of Sam that he carries a little torch for her, before they break into a loud childish spat, and it's up to Norm to remind them (and us) that they're having this tiff in a public place. Then we get our first taste of the greek chorus from the bar as they debate Sam and Diane, eventually breaking out into an even rowdier argument over who's crazy about who.
Stray Thought
I might've mentioned this in a previous blog, but Mary Tyler Moore's got me thinking...am I alone in hearing Mimsie the MTM cat's 'mew' in my head at the end of every Cheers episode? Lots of MTM alum worked on/created Cheers, but the show wasn't part of its stable. I put this trick of the mind down to two potential culprits: repeat association with other MTM shows like WKRP in Cincinnati, OR I've entered an alternative universe
Trivia
I think this is the first time we get a look at Sam's pre-date ritual, accompanied in this instance by Norm and Cliff humming a little bullfighter's march.
Guest Stars
- Like a lot of Canadian actors (Gordon Pinsent, Graham Greene, John Vernon...), Derek McGrath's considered more of a character actor south of the border, while consistently playing lead and major supporting roles north of the 49th Parallel. My own personal introduction was TV Ontario's MathMakers:
But he really made an impression playing the bumbling father figure, Dr. Benjamin Jeffcoate, alongside Jerry O'Connell on My Secret Identify which ran for three seasons. But it felt like longer due to endless reruns:
McGrath played bit parts in movies like Mr. Mom and Freaked (featuring Mr. T as The Bearded Lady), and he made his first appearance as "Nichiren Shoshu Member" in Hal Ashby's The Last Detail. Forget Scorsese, Lumet, Allen, Coppola, and the other usual suspects--if you're looking for the filmmaker whose movies defined the '70s, Ashby's your man. Starting with The Landlord in '70 and wrapping the decade on a high note with Being There in '79, the seven films Ashby made in the Me Decade constitute a near-perfect run. I could go on and on, but Bobcat Goldthwait might say it best: "...you know, when I saw Harold and Maude, I didn’t laugh; I was a boy and I just felt like a Starbelly Sneetch finding the other Starbelly Sneetches, you know."
He's no stranger to the stage, but McGrath's mostly known for his work in television, having guested and/or recurred on everything from Newhart to Dallas and Star Trek: Voyager with long runs on Canadian-filmed series like Doc and Little Mosque on the Prairie; he's also kept busy doing voice work on everything from the Inspector Gadget reboot to Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood on PBS. Approaching five decades in the biz, McGrath shows no signs of slowing down, recently reuniting with his old co-star in a guest spot on Jerry O'Connell's Carter earlier this year. In the clip below, McGrath gets to really show his stuff on an oddly old fashioned (even for '85) variety show pilot, The Cracker Brothers, which also starred another recurring Cheers guest, Mark King:
I'm thinking I should just start a Derek McGrath blog, and there's too many clips on youtube I'd love to highlight, but I must stop. After one more clip! Pardon the quiet audio, but here's McGrath at a charity event playing a lovely tune he wrote himself. Watch yer back, Bruce Cockburn!
- Gretchen Corbett plays Sam's date who's also named Gretchen. A busy theatre director and actor, Corbett's likely best known to TV audiences as James Garners' lawyer and on-off girlfriend on The Rockford Files...what was up with all the old dudes hooking up with much younger women on '70s detective shows? Rockford, MacMillan & Wife, Hart to Hart, Mrs. Columbo...they all had age gaps of ten-twenty years between their leading men and ladies. In fact, as a kid, I just assumed Mrs. Columbo (I didn't know the diff between Mrs. and Ms.) was Columbo's daughter, given the 28-year age gap. Peter Falk might've felt weird about it, too, because he never showed up on his TV wife's show.
Corbett's mostly stuck to the stage in recent years, but she still pops up on TV from time to time. Like this recurring character on Portlandia, set in her home town:
- Doug Sheehan plays Walter, Diane's numbers-obsessed date. I'm not sure what he's up to now, but Sheeran was a busy actor through the eighties and nineties, guesting or recurring on shows like TV's Clueless and Macgyver with his last credited appearance on Sabrina, The Teenage Witch in '03.
Thinking of Bruce Cockburn, here's a mid-70s gem from the man himself:
Cheers!
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