Ted Danson once admitted that it was sometimes hard to be in the same room as Shelley Long — unfortunate since they were co-stars on Cheers. Rhea Perlman was more diplomatic when she discussed working with Long on Watch What Happens Live a few years ago, but she essentially co-signed on Danson’s assessment.
Andy Cohen, who never met a piece of juicy showbiz gossip he didn’t devour, asked Perlman if the rumors were true: Did Long really have “so much friction” with the rest of the cast?
“Yeah,” Perlman replied without hesitation.
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Then she softened her answer. “There was a little bit,” admitted the actress who played Carla Tortelli for 11 seasons. “She left, and then we had Kirstie (Alley), and life moved on.”
Wasn’t it difficult to continue the show without Long, who won an Emmy and two Golden Globe awards for playing elitist snob Diane Chambers? “People didn’t think Shelley Long could be replaced,” Cohen reminded Perlman. “Shelley Long probably didn’t think she could be replaced either.”
But Alley, who played the bar’s new manager, Rebecca Howe, quickly erased any memories of on-set strife with Long. “It was truly one of the greatest first days,” Perlman said, “as it was when Woody (Harrelson) took over for Coach, who died, Nicholas Colasanto. We all thought he was irreplaceable. These two people just were the exact people you needed.”
While Long wasn’t a total nightmare on the Cheers set, it seems fair to call her challenging. In his memoir, Directed by James Burrows, the show’s creator recalled filming alternate takes for Sam and Diane’s final scene. “Shelly took so long to get ready for the second version that I missed the Paul Simon concert I had tickets to.” Maybe not the end of the world, but, “well, seeing Paul was important to me,” Burrows confessed.
Long blames some of her conflicts with Danson and Kelsey Grammer on the way her character was written. (Grammer’s memoir claims producers kept extending the Frasier character because Long hated Grammer and they wanted to spite her.) “Diane was … a pain in the butt … and I think the people of Cheers got me confused with that,” she said in 1993, according to Entertainment Weekly. “Maybe I did too, which convinced me it was time to let go of that persona.”
And it was time for Cheers to let go of Diane. In the show’s first season without Long, Cheers finished number one in the ratings. ”Shelley’s leaving reenergized the bar,” noted Burrows.
“Everybody was a little worried after Shelley left,” Perlman told The Huffington Post in 2014. “But I just knew it would go on.”
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