TELEVISION; Can Kirstie Alley Keep the ‘Cheers’ Bar Open?

KIRSTIE ALLEY SAT IN A COR-ner of Stage 25 Pararamount -the stage where ”Cheers” has been filmed for the last five years. There were 10 cigarette butts standing on end, like a row of primitive soldiers, in front of her. ”When I’m nervous, I don’t eat and I smoke cigarettes and line them up,” she said. ”Walking around this set, I shake. For the first few days I was out of my mind. I felt like when I went to a new school in my new dress with my new pencil box.”

It was early in August and the 31-year-old actress was in a harsher place than a new school. The first show of the 1987-88 season was in production and Kirstie Alley was the new woman on ”Cheers” – the replacement for Shelley Long on television’s No. 3 show.

At 11 A.M. last December 15, Ms. Long had made it official. After five years, she was walking out of her job as Diane the waitress in a Boston bar from 9 to 9:30 on Thursday nights on NBC – and walking into a blossoming film career. A few television series -”M*A*S*H,” ”All in the Family,” and ”Three’s Company” among them – had survived and even thrived after the loss of a major character. Would ”Cheers,” which has its season premiere Thursday, join them? Or would it be belly up this year?

In August, the only sign of Ms. Long on Stage 25 was a large basket of cookies and muffins with a legend attached: ”Cheers Crew and Extras, Make it a good one and enjoy! With love and light, Shelley.”

In a yellow polo shirt and with a spotlight turning the bald spot on his head into a halo, James Burrows smiled at Ms. Alley. He was doing what he does best – what the director of a situation comedy must do well – exuding warmth and pleasure, laughing at his actors’ jokes, giving hearty hugs and scattering good will. During this week of rehearsals, he had been startled by ”how scared Kirstie is. To have nervousness on the set is so weird. We haven’t had it for four years.” Mr. Burrows and Les and Glen Charles created ”Cheers” and nursed it from dead last in the ratings to No. 3 behind ”Cosby” and ”Family Ties.” They made America care about the corkscrew turns in the relationship of Sam the bar owner and ex-baseball player and Diane the pretentious waitress. When Shelley Long announced that she was leaving, they were faced with creating a character and choosing an actress to replace Diane in Sam’s life, if not in his bed.

All agreed that the show needed another female character. They decided very quickly that the most interesting thing they could do was reverse the relationship between Sam, played by Ted Danson, and the woman. Sam owned the bar and Diane was his waitress. What if this new woman owns or manages the bar and Sam is her bartender? They wrote a five-minute scene for a tough woman boss and began auditioning. Their immediate decision was to eliminate every actress who looked like Shelley Long. ”The one thing you won’t see next year is a blonde waitress,” Mr. Burrows said in February, when the three men began to explore the problem.

Characters are not always docile enough to obey their creators. To their surprise, the Charles brothers discovered that the reversed situation loosened Sam up and made him a little more carefree. ”Where he was straight man to Shelley, now he can be more of a goof-off,” said Les Charles.

Almost the first actress they auditioned was brown-haired Kirstie Alley, who had made her screen debut with pointed ears as the half-Vulcan Lieutenant Saavik in ”Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” and followed that movie with major roles in a series of films that sank without a trace, including ”Champions” opposite John Hurt and ”Runaway” with Tom Selleck. She had had better luck on television, playing Gloria Steinem in the 1985 ”Bunny’s Tale” and the sister of her real-life husband, the actor Parker Stevenson, on the mini-series ”North and South.” Ms. Alley recently co-starred with Mark Harmon in ”Summer School” and will soon be seen opposite Sidney Poitier and Tom Berenger in ”Mountain King.”

To the creators of ”Cheers,” the only thing wrong with Ms. Alley was that finding her was suspiciously easy. ”She was an unfamiliar face on television so we wouldn’t be tilting the balance of the show by bringing in a known quantity,” said Mr. Burrows. ”She had an incredible sexy voice that was perfect to drive Ted bananas. In the test scene, there was a line where she says she’s not attracted to Sam. With Kirstie, you believed it.”

But the first actress to be handed the script couldn’t be perfect for the role, could she? Life – or at least television – never works that well. So they auditioned actress after actress in an attempt to improve on Ms. Alley. No one did. But whether she succeeds in wooing the public and her co-stars is not entirely up to her. Her character, Rebecca Howe, is an obnoxious outsider who runs the bar as though it’s an army camp. ”We only met a few seconds ago and I’m already tired of you,” she tells Sam. ”You’re giving me a headache behind the eyes and it feels like a tiny little insect boring into my brain.”

Acting is not to be confused with real life, but when characters close ranks against another character, the actors may sometimes unconsciously close ranks against the person who plays the role.

”I know the crew and cast as well as anyone I went to high school with,” said George Wendt, who plays Norman, the jolly fat man who spends his evenings watching sports on television at the bar. ”That would tend to make any newcomer shy.”

Other changes also made the old ensemble feel somewhat uncomfortable. ”The office is not Sam’s office any more,” said Mr. Wendt. ”He can’t go there and run away. To take away a space like that changes the dynamics of the show.”

”Sam and Diane were the center of ‘Cheers’ as a partnership and now the partnership is gone,” said Ted Danson. ”There will be huge comparisons made. It’s been a long time since we’ve been judged and I’m out of practice.”

Jim Burrows and Les and Glen Charles were more sanguine as they prowled the set. They had had their night terrors last December.

”I felt abandonment,” said the 46-year-old Mr. Burrows. ”I’ve directed all but three shows. I’m like the father. It’s hard to understand why the children want to leave home.”

”Like it or not,” said the 44-year-old Glen Charles, ”A television series is a family and there’s a sense of loss when anyone departs.”

Les, the younger of the Charles brothers by five years, was frightened. ”For five years, we’ve had a safe little cubby-hole,” he said. ”Now we have to prove ourselves again.”

The three men have 17 Emmys among them for writing, directing and producing, and fear turned more quickly than they expected into exhilaration. ”There was relief being tossed into the deep end of the pool,” said Les Charles.

”The three of us have been with Sam and Diane a long time and we’re a little tired of their shenanigans,” said Mr. Burrows.

”A little bored,” added Les Charles, ”and amazed America was so passionate about them.”

From February until the four cameras were pushed into position on Stage 25 in August, the creators of the series worked to solve the practical and artistic puzzles caused by the departure of Shelley Long.

Their first problem was how to keep Sam and Diane from getting married. The marriage had been scheduled to take place on the last show of the season, but the plans were upset, of course, by Ms. Long’s decision to leave the show. None of the creators had been particularly happy with the idea of marrying them off, but Sam and Diane had gone to bed together during the second year, and the courtship had been stretched as long as possible. ”We sort of felt we’d explored everything we could with two single people,” said Mr. Burrows.

A show had already been shot in which Sam and Diane bought a house. On Feb. 24, with the last show going into production eight days later and no script written, the three men sat in Glen Charles’s office in a ramshackle building at Paramount, throwing out wild ideas of how they could keep the characters from getting married.

Glen Charles suggested they do a show centered around the other waitress, Carla, played by Rhea Pearlman, and just have her say, ”By the way, Sam and Diane split up.”

”They get married,” Les Charles said, ”the thrill of the chase is over, and three minutes later they don’t have anything to say to each other.” They even discussed a scenario in which Sam and Diane have a baby and Sam is somehow left as a single parent, giving the bar regulars and employees a child to raise.

With a successful show almost on automatic pilot, the brothers had not written many episodes of ”Cheers” during the last two years, but they did write the last show of the 1986-87 season and the first show of the 1987-88 season. They delayed writing both scripts as long as possible. ”Putting things off to the last second provides the necessary tension of waking up at 3 A.M. in sheer terror,” said Les Charles. ”For television, you should always write as the cast is standing on the stage waiting,” said Glen Charles. Both married, both childless, both smoking big cigars, the brothers have worked together all their lives. They possess – according to those who worked with them on ”Phyllis,” ”Taxi” and ”The Bob Newhart Show” – an intimacy and lack of sibling rivalry that is extremely rare.

On the last show, they would have to be careful, in Les Charles’s words, ”not to pull the rug out from under the characters.” Though they toyed with the idea of making Diane a villain, they did not want to do anything drastic that would upset an audience that had been watching the relationship wind its complicated way through several seasons. They could not, for example, bring another man in to win Diane away from Sam in 22 minutes.

Even more important, they had to protect the character of Sam, played by Ted Danson. Mr. Danson had signed for a sixth year. The audience’s sympathy must stay with him, so he couldn’t be allowed to jilt Diane. But he would appear wimpy if she walked out on him.

In the end, the solution was a deus ex machina – Diane’s college professor boyfriend who had jilted her in the bar in the opening show five seasons ago sent the half-finished novel she had left with him to a publisher, who was enthusiastic about the manuscript. Sam insisted that she go off and finish the book. She said she would return in six months. ”Have a great life,” he whispered after her.

On May 7, during the filming of that last episode, the actors were as edgy as the show’s creators. ”It’s kinda like when someone dies and you don’t believe it,” said Mr. Wendt. John Ratzenberger, who plays Cliff the mailman, another regular at the bar, stoutly put his trust in the direction of Mr. Burrows and in the scripts of the Charles brothers – ”I’d follow their writing into hell,” he said. ”We went into the unknown five years ago when we were wet behind the ears and now we’re seasoned vets.” Ms. Long, who has a reputation for being difficult, wasn’t talking, but according to Mr. Danson, ”In the scene where we said goodbye, some real emotion crept in.”

To the creators of ”Cheers,” the tall, lanky Mr. Danson is the heart of the show. ”I don’t think you could do ‘Cheers’ without Sam,” said Mr. Burrows. ”It would be the same as if Alan Alda had left ‘M*A*S*H’ or John Ritter had left ‘Three’s Company.’ ”

A successful sitcom must have at its center a likable, funny character, played by an actor who also appears likable, according to Glen Charles. ”If that television star actually came into a person’s living room, they might not like him,” he said. ”But they think they would.”

By mid-March, the last show was in the can and decisions about the new season could no longer be delayed. Just as that episode recycled a character from the first show, the idea of giving Sam a female boss was one of the original concepts the three men had tossed around when they were creating ”Cheers.” They eventually rejected it, said Les Charles, ”because we got struck by the idea of the Diane character – an overintellectual perpetual student who was the antithesis of the stolid ex-athlete played by Ted. The original Sam was to be a wide receiver for the New England Patriots, but then we cast Ted and he looked more like a baseball player.”

On the set in August, as the first show of the new season was being shot, the lights are turned on. Four burly men wearing shorts push the cameras forward. Mr. Burrows calls for his actors. A bearded Ted Danson bursts through the door of the bar. Unable to stand the memories, he had sold Cheers and bought a boat. He had intended to sail around the world, but the boat sank. The money he got from the sale of the bar is at the bottom of the ocean.

Will Sam and Rebecca eventually become partners, in or out of bed? Les Charles, a quiet man, shrugs. ”When the actors get an idea where a relationship is going, they’ll play to it before the writers know,” he said.

For the moment, Sam exudes the sexy charm that has always worked so well and a disdainful Rebecca tosses her tangled hair and strikes him out. Things are going to be very different at ”Cheers” this year.