The iconic NBC sitcom, Cheers, could be getting a British reboot more than 30 years after it wrapped.
Set in a Boston bar, the long-running comedy helped launch the careers of some of Hollywood’s biggest names, including Ted Danson, Woody Harrelson, Shelley Long, Rhea Perlman, Kelsey Grammer and the late Kirstie Alley.
London-based production company Big Talk Studios was given the green light to develop an adaptation of Cheers alongside CBS Studios for the U.K. market. Big Talk is now pitching the new show to British broadcasters and has picked writer Simon Nye to be show runner should it get the show to air, per a Deadline report.
Newsweek contacted Big Talk’s CEO, Kenton Allen, by email on Wednesday morning for comment. We also contacted the representatives of some of the actors by email for their thoughts on the reboot.
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Allen told Deadline it was a “huge honor” to be allowed to reboot such a legendary TV show.
“I might be insane,” he admitted, saying it would be a “huge challenge” to get the new version right.
“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.”
Big Talk has produced other comedies such as The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin starring Noel Fielding on Apple TV+ and BBC / Amazon series The Outlaws among others. Earlier this year, it helped to adapt the successful British TV comedy, Friday Night Dinner, for Amazon Freevee. The American version is called Dinner with the Parents and stars Dan Bakkedahl (Veep) and Michaela Watkins (Casual).
Cheers first debuted in 1982, ran for 11 seasons and is often considered one of the best TV comedies of all time.
Former Newsweek TV reporter Harry F. Waters wrote about Cheers’ final show after 275 episodes on air.
“Cheers has remained TV’s most unsentimental comedy, as disdainful of schmaltz as it was resistant to preachiness,” Waters wrote in 1993. “For openers, the creators were smart enough to set it in a bar… Bars are also places where inhibitions dissolve and put-downs tend to ricochet, and the insults in Cheers approached comedic art.
“Yet even the nastiest sparring went down smoothly: it sprang from recognizable frailties and understandable needs. Besides, we were all friends. As the show’s writers displayed remarkable adaptability over 11 seasons, adding strong new characters and giving the regulars new dimensions, only the bar, a kind of night-care center for losers, never changed its character.”