Cheers (season 1) Super Bowl pre-game segment on January 30, 1983, along with sketches for other NBC shows, including "The A-Team". After efforts to improve the ratings failed, NBC approved production of nine more episodes, and renewed the series for the next season. Before "Where Everybody Knows Your Name", written by Gary Portnoy and Judy Hart Angelo became the show's theme song, "Cheers" producers rejected two of Portnoy's and Hart Angelo's songs. The songwriters had collaborated to provide music for "Preppies" an unsuccessful Broadway musical. When told they could not appropriate "People Like Us", "Preppies"s opening song, the pair wrote "My Kind of
Michael Portnoy of Lip", were antic and unpredictable, and characterized by dense language play, song and movement fragments and rapid transformations of character. In the mid 1990s, Portnoy regularly performed in venues such as Surf Reality and Luna Lounge's weekly show "Eating It", the epicenter of New York's alternative comedy scene. His wild and abstract theatrical performances, which occasionally interrupted and challenged other comedians on stage, prompted "Time Out New York" to describe him as "the bad boy of comedy", and the "New York Post" to dub him "the next Andy Kaufman". At the same time, Portnoy started working as a dancer