The Tonight Show - "Cheers" Last Call 

They should have watched Seinfeld.

My parents let me stay up to watch it.

We did. It was ok. @@michaelb9537

@@michaelb9537The Cheers finale and Seinfeld finale both with monster ratings. Those were the days.

​@@LAFancheers is one of my favourite comedies

Major Trauma - No kidding, I was in my teens, never really watched Cheers, was kind of late to the party as far as nearly every significant pop culture thing from the 90's because I was a HUGE nerd, and the Only Thing I really remember about the Cheers finale was this spectacular fiasco of a Tonight Show. What a time.

Dunno how old you are obviously, but you've got to remember that there were only a handful of channels back then. Everything got viewing figures which the vast majority of shows would kill for nowadays. And a show that became a big hit like Cheers: we're talking more than thirty million viewers in the US per episode at its peak. Or around three times what Game of Thrones gets now.

Network television had a lot of great shows in the 90's and very few of them had finales that matched this kind of hype and viewership. Seinfeld and Friends similarly had very highly anticipated send offs but I can't think of any others that were in the same neighborhood as this. A lot of shows from this era clearly diminished and jumped the shark in their final years where a lot of people simply didn't care enough to consider the finale a must see. Cheers was smart to leave on top while they still had strong ratings but I believe this show probably had at least 1 more good year left in them.

It may not be a traditional sitcom, but one could put M*A*S*H up there with it.

Also, the show had an incredible 11 season run and the show started off as the lowest rated TV show during the 1982-83 season and the show rosed to number 1! NBC in general wasn’t the same after 1993 with a number of hit shows leaving around 1992 and 1993.

@@a.b.s_productions Cheers was pretty much the last one standing from their 80s era generation by 92-93, it felt like a real changing of the guard when they left as the vibes from the 80s/early 90s were starting to be overtaken by the newer flavor of the mid 90s when the 93-94 TV season rolled around without Cheers to keep that old school energy alive.

R.I.P. Kirstie Alley (1951-2022)

​@@niamhflynnshe'll always be Rebecca Howe to us cheers fans

SO many car commercials wow

Same age as you. Didn’t get into cheers as much as I did with frasier.

I loved the later seasons of Cheers too, it would've been interesting to see what a 12th season would've been like had they returned for 93-94.

Really it should have been the network apologizing to the actors since it seems obvious this would happen and they proceeded with it anyways because of the numbers it would pull in.

,,shoulda been Seinfeld

@@harrymarshall Cheers is so much better than that show.

@@bobbyjohns ,, depends, Seinfeld is about private internal cringe,, Cheers is about being today's doofus amongst a crowd of intermittent doofs that have their own private limelight stenches 🍺🥨 golly!! These pretzels, are making me thirsty ‼️🥵

☝🏻☝🏻☝🏻☝🏻☝🏻💯💯💯💯💯 For. REAL.

I wish Conan or Letterman would have done this. Granted it was 1993 so not sure if Leno was the better option at the time….

@@creativejeans9983 Letterman was still on Late Night when this show aired. Leno was the only viable option as this was the final months of The Tonight Show's total monopoly of Late Night.

@@VaporCollector1992 NBC was not going to wait for 12:30 AM to give it a sendoff when the show meant so much to the network.

Did the cast take photos with fans?

@@Lance514 i don't remember them doing that. I remember them up on the balcony completely drunk out of their minds and Jay tring to interview them seemed futile. lol

Awesome!!!!!!!

@@markallendor6237that's awesome

If so, then it was a funny introduction.

“Hey a Senator!”

With Johnny!!!!!!!

Well it wasn't. I can get nostalgic too but things just weren't better in the old days. They were simpler yes. But people also got away with murder back then. Just think of how many serial killers there were Vs now. And how it was hard to get a creative job or being able to live as an artist. Weed was illegal. Racism among cops. USA invading Kuwait starting the whole middle East debacle that lead up to 9/11. Russia in chaos. We were just less informed about what was going on and lived more in our small bubbles. So simpler times doesn't make them better.

@@eltoro969 Oh. Ok.

@@eltoro969 Being less informed isn't necessarily a bad thing, perception vs reality. Nothing you could of done to change any events from the past, so why dwell on them ?

DeAngelo Stevens I think we all watched it at grandmas house lol

That would have been WXIA-TV 11 Alive.

@@michaelglickman1300 You're right

Leno took over from Carson exactly one year before.

Paul always gets left out.

You should see New Year’s Eve.

It was so great seeing this LIVE. Great memories. 😂

Because he is their dad?

hey Yo, he sounds nervous and yelling. Also, he doesn't confidence in his own jokes.....

💯

He’s a mediocre talent at best.

@@thefonzkiss LOL mediocre talents don't last 2 decades at #1 in the ratings. Try again.

He was terrific, very fast and very funny and he was able to take took political swipes at both sides and still be funny. At the very least, he was better than ANY talk show host we seen in the past 12 years.

Talk about digression lol

Johnny would've been right. This show was a train wreck and wasn't particularly good unless you're a huge fan of cheers.

Aaron Handy III you could see Leno’s frustration

And a year after Johnny Carson was guested on “Cheers” in an episode called “Here’s Cliffy”.

Hard to believe that this was the Thursday before Jurassic Park

Why is that hard to believe?

@@mikew12261I thought the same thing. What’s so hard to believe about it??

I noticed Paul there in the end

Might be because Bob Costa is a broadcaster, and Jay Leno is a stand up comedian.

NBC had no other sitcoms anyone watched except *Gimme A Break, Diff’rent Strokes, The Facts of Life, Silver Spoons,* and *Family Ties.* Those were still overshadowed by dramas and action shows, namely *Dallas, Hill Street Blues, Magnum PI,* and *Dynasty,* and by CBS’s remaining 1970s sitcom holdovers like *MASH, One Day at a Time, Alice,* and *The Jeffersons* plus what was left of *Happy Days* (which managed to outlive all its spinoffs) and *Three’s Company* on ABC with *Taxi* jumping networks to avoid competing with Gary Coleman. Thus NBC was more inclined to take a chance on a show that they knew would thrive if given enough time to build an audience. The other two networks would have gotten impatient and demanded instant success. Even NBC now seems to have forgotten the lesson of this show’s slow-and-steady journey to the top of the ratings. The same year the show premiered, NBC’s top rated show was *The A-Team.* That show was gone before Shelley Long was gone from this one.

Actually, that's a shot at Letterman who just left NBC at the same time for CBS to do the Late Show.

Yeah, straight into the dumper.