“I don’t know too many people who would walk away from a mega hit like Cheers voluntarily,” Phil Donahue told Shelley Long in 1987.
Long heard that one a lot. In 1995, another interviewer approached the subject like this: “You’ve been in a lot of big hits, and you’ve been in some films that didn’t do as well.”
“Yeah, some flops,” Long laughed.
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“Well, it seems like when the films that don’t do as well come out, there’s always some reviewer who says, ‘Oh, she shouldn’t have left Cheers,’ and they harp on that. Did that ever get you down? Were there moments when you regretted that decision at all?”
No regrets, replied Long. But there was something else that was getting her down. “I’ve been annoyed by the comments and the constant questions of ‘Do you regret? Do you ever regret? Do you blah blah blah?’”
She gave an answer she’d been repeating for years. “I don’t regret it!” she insisted. “I’ve said it over and over again.”
One reason she might have been sick of the question was those box-office flops. While Long starred in some successful movie comedies, including Outrageous Fortune, The Brady Bunch Movie and The Money Pit, none of them were huge hits like Cheers. That led to outlets like Time calling Long’s departure “probably one of the greatest career stumbles in show-business history.”
Long insisted her decision was about spending time with her family. Her daughter was two when she left the successful sitcom, and making movies required less time away from home. When she was four years into her five-year deal, she let the Cheers producers know that she was leaning toward leaving — but didn’t fully commit to an exit, she told Donahue.
That’s why Cheers filmed three different endings for Diane’s final episode. Sure, producers were worried that someone might leak the plot to the press, but the real reason they filmed alternate endings was that they thought there was a good chance Long would change her mind. Like Donahue wondered, who walks away from a mega hit like Cheers voluntarily?
But Long stuck to her guns and bid adieu to Sam and the rest of the gang, heading off to the greener pastures of movies like The Boyfriend School and sperm bank comedy Frozen Assets. (Siskel and Ebert called it “the worst comedy ever made.”) Long was defiant: “I felt that I had completed my obligation and was ready for other things.”
“I didn’t want to keep doing the same episode over and over again,” she said in 2007 on an Australian show called, appropriately, Where Are They Now? “It had been such a fresh and vital experience for me. I didn’t want it to become old and stale.”
Old and stale like the “Why did you leave Cheers?” question she’d been answering for 30 years. “It was a great show, a great opportunity. I loved coming back and doing the last episode,” she said back in 1995. “But don’t ever ask me that question again, okay?”
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