Yeah, they are remaking Cheers.

No, really. There's a Cheers remake being shopped around. With an unexpected twist.

Oct 02, 2024

Strange, strange news to wake up to this morning. There is a Cheers remake currently being shopped around. But, before you immediately dismiss what I am embracing as a good idea, you probably should know: It’s a UK-set remake.

Big Talk Studios is the company behind this. Recent show’s of theirs include David Mitchell’s new detective comedy show Ludwig, Apple TV+’s The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin (starring Noel Fielding), and Stephen Merchant comedy The Outlaws.

Already, that sounds promising. I’m less enthused to hear that Simon Nye (Men Behaving Badly, The Durrells, The Larkins) is writing, but I’m not immediately distressed by this and am willing to keep an open mind.

As per Deadline:

Kenton Allen, Big Talk’s chief executive, said it was a “huge honor” to be entrusted with the comedy and it would be a “huge challenge” to get it right.
“I might be insane,” Allen joked. He was reluctant to say too much about Big Talk’s plans for Cheers, but revealed that the series would be set in a pub. “The British pub is an endangered species, so there’s an answer for the ‘Why now?’ about it,” he said. “The attitudes of Cheers in the ‘80s are very different to the attitudes of today, so there’s a massive amount of work to be done around taking inspiration from the original characters but creating something fresh.”

I actually see it a little differently - what makes Cheers still very watchable today is that the attitudes of the characters aren’t that different to the attitudes of today. The only elements that don’t quite hold up are perhaps Sam Malone’s Lothario ways and there’s a really gross gay panic episode in the first season of the show. But beyond that, it all holds together pretty well.

Cheers: Where Everybody Knows Your Name - LIFE

A US remake would just draw unnecessary comparisons (just do something new), but a UK translation of the idea into UK pub culture feels like an organic fit.

RIP John Amos

In writing about John Amos, I’d like to be a bit more high minded with my own remembrance by talking about his role in iconic 70s mini-series Roots. Quietly, I’m a child of the 1980s and I’ve never actually seen Roots. I have seen many, many, many hours of 70s sitcom Good Times. But even that’s not where my mind immediately goes with John Amos.

Mr. Amos’s character wears a multicolored buttoned shirt as he points to something offscreen. His on-screen wife stands behind him, clutching his left shoulder as she smiles.

It isn’t with The West Wing, where Amos played a beloved recurring character Admiral Fitzwallace (AKA “Fitz”). Man, I loved him in that show. I also really love seeing his weatherman character recurring on early era episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Will McKinley on X: "I wish John Amos as Gordy the Weatherman had become a full-fledged "Mary Tyler Moore" cast member. He's supercool. https://t.co/wHn52yHbzw" / X

He was also memorably the surprise villain in the second Die Hard film.

But that’s not how I best remember John Amos. Those aren’t the roles that immediately come to mind (even if they aren’t far from my thoughts).

For me, John Amos is Cleo McDowell - the owner of Queens family-owned fast food restaurant McDowells. He makes me laugh out loud every time I see that film. I just watched this clip again and it brought me so much joy:

John Amos died six weeks ago, on August 21 of natural causes. He was 84 years old.

A notoriously prickly actor (or just outspoken… it’s really a matter of perspective), the New York Times obit has this oft-told story from Good Times:

“Good Times” accrued high ratings and was lauded for making television history — it was one of the first sitcoms with an all-Black cast, preceding Mr. Lear’s “The Jeffersons” (1975-85). But Ms. [Esther] Rolle and Mr. Amos felt that there were still inroads to be made by Black members of the production, and they pushed Mr. Lear to allow them to modify the scripts, which had largely been drafted by white writers.
“They’d go on about their credits,” Mr. Amos said of the writers in an interview with the SiriusXM program “Sway in the Morning.” Then he’d ask them, “‘Well, how long have you been Black? That just doesn’t happen in the community. We don’t think that way. We don’t act that way. We don’t let our children do that.’”

Obviously, the number one thing I feel everyone should watch if they want to mark Amos’ passing is Coming To America. But, something really off-the-radar of most people is an interesting show he made in 1994 which was quickly cancelled: 704 Hauser.

The premise of the show has an African American family living in the same house that once belonged to Archie Bunker from All In The Family. Produced by Norman Lear, John Amos plays the Democrat patriarch of the family with a pre-Newsradio Maura Tierney as the white girl dating his conservative son. You can find episodes of the show on YouTube. It’s an interesting premise and unique - how often have we seen a spin-off to a show where the only carry-over is the setting?

File:704 Hauser living room set.png - Wikimedia Commons

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