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
Where Everybody Knows Your Name for a new musical he was producing. On a whim, Hart, who had never written a song, approached Portnoy, who had never written for the theater. Together they set out to compose the words and music for the musical named "Preppies". In the spring of 1982, Judy, now using her full married name of Judy Hart Angelo, sent a tape of "Preppies"' opening number "People Like Us" to a friend in California, who then passed it on to television producers Glen and Les Charles. Upon hearing it they each felt that with a lyric re-write "People Like Us" would be