Cheers 45 on TV Guide's 100 Greatest Episodes of All-Time. In 2002, "Cheers" was ranked No. 18 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time. In 2013, the Writers Guild of America ranked it as the eighth best written TV series and "TV Guide" ranked it #11 on their list of the 60 Greatest Shows of All Time. Before the "Cheers" pilot "Give Me a Ring Sometime" was completed and aired in 1982, the series originally consisted of four employees in the first script. Neither Norm Peterson nor Cliff Clavin, regular customers of Cheers, were featured; later revisions added
Home Is the Sailor (Cheers) promises nothing of the sort will occur again and is provisionally re-hired on the understanding that this is his last chance as Rebecca uses a seductive baseball metaphor-pun about having two outs, two strikes and "no balls". The producers intended "Cheers" to be a comedy about a comedy itself set in the Boston bar, but, as Burrows claimed, the "Sam and Diane" story arc predominated the show for five years and, as he hypothesized, would have made the bar more of a minor role and more irrelevant if Shelley Long had not left the show as Diane Chambers in 1987.