Cheers to George Wendt, World’s Greatest Barfly

Cheers’s opening theme song said the eponymous bar was where everybody knows your name. But only one of its regulars was beloved enough to have his name shouted in unison every time he walked into the place. Norm, a.k.a. Norman Peterson, a.k.a. Normie, a.k.a. Mr. Peterson (if you were Woody the bartender), was an accountant written as an easygoing, utterly average dude who liked his beer and his bar pals and made jokes about how unsatisfying every aspect of his life was, including his weight, his age, his health, his job, and his marriage to Vera, the only woman he’d ever been with. But the more viewers got to know the character — played, of course, by George Wendt, who died yesterday at 76 in his sleep of unknown causes, according to his family — the more complex, and in some ways tragic, he seemed.

The seeds of the character’s greatness were there in the writing from the moment the show premiered in 1982 with “Give Me a Ring Sometime,” which featured the first of 273 exchanges between Norm and bar patrons following his entrance. (The bar’s owner, ex–Red Sox pitcher Sam Malone, played by Ted Danson, calls out, “How ya doin’, Norm? Whaddaya know?” And Norm mutters, “Not enough,” before taking his customary seat.)

Wendt embodied Norm so completely from frame one that he inspired the writers and producers to keep unpacking new layers, all the way through the show’s 11th and last season, when, in the final episode, the highest honor that could be given to a sitcom’s supporting character is bestowed on Norm: He gets to retroactively define what the show has always been about. Following yet another of Sam’s botched attempts at reuniting with his ex-girlfriend Diane Chambers (Shelley Long), the diehards hang out after-hours and smoke cigars before exiting the place one by one, leaving only Sam and Norm, who pauses at the front door on his way out and quietly says, “She’ll always come back to you” — an oblique confirmation that Sam’s true great love was always Cheers itself.

The show took a then-déclassé format, the half-hour situation comedy written and filmed like a stage play, and raised it to the level of the best screwball comedies of Hollywood’s early sound era, when directors like Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges and Frank Capra dumped a dozen or so eccentric characters into a story line engineered with the precision of a pinball game to make them tumble and collide. The writing rhythm was particular and ritualized. The viewer got used to it and could usually predict where a moment would go, even though it was difficult to guess exactly how it would get there. It was up to the actors to inject suspense or surprise through their delivery. All the cast members were wizards of the timing that the form demanded. But Wendt was a cut above, maybe because he was in many ways the “smallest” in terms of his acting, always doing more with less, a master of the expertly judged pauses that could knock a funny line into the next county. Whether Wendt was working within an ensemble or breaking off for a duet with Sam, Diane, or one of the other regulars, Norm was the bar’s stealthy standout.

Wendt was the first actor I recall seeing identified in a review with the adjective the great in front of his name. Writing about the first episode, the TV critic for my local newspaper did the expected rundown of the plot and characters. Every actor — including Danson, already somewhat of a familiar face thanks to roles in the films Body Heat and The Onion Field and many guest shots on hit TV programs — was name-checked in parentheses. Wendt, though, was described as “the great George Wendt.” I took this to mean that Wendt was an acclaimed character actor whom, as a budding film nerd, I should have already known about, like Jack Warden or Walter Huston. But no: It turned out Norm was the first role of any significance that Wendt had ever booked, after bopping around his hometown stages in Chicago (where he was one of the original members of the Second City). “The great” was in there, I now suspect, because the writer was gobsmacked by him and wanted to make sure his name jumped out.

Wendt was indeed great in just about everything, including the comedies Airplane II, Fletch, The Little Rascals, and Spice World; memorable one-off guest shots behind a microphone for The Simpsons and Family Guy (parodying Cheers); laid-back, intimate dramas like Outside Providence, Somewhere in Time, and the underseen Lakeboat (a tribute to the crews of the Great Lakes, written by Wendt’s friend and fellow Chicagoan David Mamet); and sketch-driven programs like Portlandia and Saturday Night Live (where Wendt was one of “Bob Swerski’s Superfans”). But Norm overshadowed everything else in Wendt’s CV, getting him six Emmy nominations (he never won, alas) and guaranteeing that he would never again pay for his own drinks.

I started watching Norm-centric episodes of Cheers last night while writing this, intending to skim the highlights, but the richness of both the character and the acting proved so engrossing that I ended up staying up till dawn watching every Norm plot and subplot, marveling at the correctness of Wendt’s judgment from one moment to the next and admiring how the character kept revealing new layers. The most rewarding can be found in the substrata about Vera, whom he constantly cuts down as unattractive, uninterested in sex, materialistic, and various other old-ball-and-chain clichés but who is secretly Norm’s rock. In season two’s “Norman’s Conquest” — the one in which Norm is tempted to cheat on Vera with a client of his — we learn that Norm’s wife jokes are reflexive stuff that he has never really interrogated. The gist is that he has been conditioned to act that way around other men and doesn’t have the tools or self-awareness to figure out how to quit. (There’s a classic Cheers construction in this episode when Norm tells Sam, “Those jokes about Vera aren’t even true. You know, like the one about the tentacles.”) Norm even makes a “confession” to Sam: “I love my wife.” Of course, Norm resolves to do better, then immediately rushes into the back room, where he’d just had a heart-to-heart with Sam and Diane, so he can fetch a jacket for use as a prop in yet another Vera story, then pauses at the door to tell the couple, “Ohhhh shut up!”

It’s mostly true that drama is about people changing, while comedy is about how people never change. Norm was one of the best and funniest examples of that principle, as evidenced in classic episodes like season three’s “Peterson Crusoe,” in which he has a medical scare and decides to throw his existing life away and run off to Bora Bora, then chickens out and secretly hides in Sam’s office for a week; and another season-three episode, “The Executive’s Executioner,” in which Norm accepts a soul-destroying job as a hatchet man for his firm after an executive tells him that he’ll get three times as much pay and that if he says “no,” he’s fired. “Sir,” Norm says, “I will have you know that I cannot be bought and I cannot be threatened.” [Quarter-second pause] “But if you put the two together, I’m your man.”

Stasis can be a bad thing if you’re stuck in a professional rut like Norm. But it can be a net good if the thing that never changes is essentially positive and healthy. This comes through clearly in scenes about Norm and his relationship with, and to, Vera. (Wendt’s real-life widow, the actress Bernadette Birkett, met him at the Second City in 1974.) Norm’s life is a disappointment, by his own admission, but when he clears the fog from his mind, he realizes that having met his life partner in high school is not something that happens all the time — and that Vera’s loyalty is not to be taken for granted, even when he’s telling jokes that Ralph Kramden might have found insensitive. There’s a bit of Willy Loman in Norm whenever he’s away from his best buddy, Cliff (John Ratzenberger). When they’re together, there’s Vladimir-Estragon energy with a splash of Laurel and Hardy. Considered as his own fictional creation, apart from the show and from sitcom history, Norm is an exquisitely shaped character, far more impressive to consider after an episode has ended than when you’re watching him screw up and then try to repair the damage.

The goodness in Norm comes through ever more strongly as the seasons roll on. He may be a wreck, but he’s a wreck we can all recognize and relate to. And he’s still got a moral compass. That’s why he quits the corporate-killer job after figuring out, with Diane’s help, that it’s destroying the heart-on-sleeve empathy that made his bosses recruit him in the first place. It’s also why, in season four’s “The Peterson Principle,” Norm lies to Vera after finding out that he lost a big promotion because the bosses’ wives didn’t think she was classy enough to hang with them, telling her that he was passed over for a better candidate. “I’m a loser,” he tells her on the phone. “I don’t know why you don’t just go pack up your bags and leave.” Then he adds, “Even on a terrible day like today, I feel like I’m the luckiest man in the world because I married you.” Here, as always, Wendt makes you feel the pain of being Norm but also the value. There’s always more going on in the performer’s face than the dialogue is ready to tell us — more, perhaps, than Norm himself could ever realize. That critic was right so very long ago: George Wendt was always great. Norm let us see it.