Man walks into a bar.
It’s the starting point for a million jokes. And for season after season on “Cheers,” some of the best of those were delivered by George Wendt, who died on Tuesday at age 76, as the long-suffering Norm Peterson.
We knew him, above all, from his entrances, throwing open the door of the show’s namesake tavern, greeted with a hearty — all together now — “Norm!” You could say that he was the character whom the show’s theme-song lyrics (“Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name”) were about.
Making his way in the world today, Wendt’s performance suggested, took everything Norm had got. A bedraggled accountant (later unemployed, later a house painter), Norm spent his days getting the stuffing kicked out of him by life, then returned to Cheers to replace that stuffing with beer.
“Cheers” did not take place entirely within the bar that gave the sitcom its name, but it mostly did. The setting was a place people came to escape somewhere else. And that meant that the actors portraying those suds-drinking refugees had to portray that somewhere-else entirely through the strength of their performances.
Wendt was the champion of that. His stage entrances — tie loosened, top collar button open, drawn to his bar stool as if it were a magnet — implied everything that he was hustling to get away from, every trouble he wished to drown. His wife, Vera, existed almost entirely offstage, but Wendt made their relationship real with his cheerful griping. You didn’t see his work day, but you saw how eagerly he washed down the aftertaste of it.
The one-liners that the “Cheers” writing staff produced for him helped fill in the picture, a ritual call and response with the barkeeps. “What would you like, Norm?” “A reason to live. Keep ’em coming.” “What you up to, Norm?” “My ears.” “What’s happening, Norm?” “It’s a dog-eat-dog world, Sammy, and I’m wearing Milk-Bone underwear.”
His role may not have been as expansive or nuanced as those in many of today’s streaming and cable dramedies. But often sitcom greatness is the art of doing one simple thing over and over — Norm appeared in every episode of the show’s 11 seasons — and making it feel both familiar and fresh every time. Like a bluesman writing the encyclopedia out of the same 12 bars, Wendt inscribed a character’s entire life out of small variations on one trot to the bar.
Of course, walking on to the “Cheers” set was not the sum total of Wendt’s “Cheers” performance, nor of his career. But you can do worse, as a performer and as a person, to leave enough of an impression that your walking through a door makes people want to cry out in welcome.
In Wendt’s hands, a single running joke became a kind of philosophical investigation of life’s Sisyphean patterns. Norm was a survivor of the most ordinary kind, kicked around, worn out and disappointed by the world. But every day, he came back for another round.
James Poniewozik is the chief TV critic for The Times. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics.
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