If you haven't seen Mr. Belvedere in a while, you can rest assured that it's not any better than you recall. To the extent that sitcom, which ran for six seasons on ABC, is remembered at all it's because it starred Bob Uecker. It's ironic, then, that Uecker's greatest contribution to sitcom history may be to a show he never even appeared on: In a small but meaningful way, Uecker was one of the inspirations for Cheers.
In the early '80s, Uecker had parlayed his baseball career and frequent appearances on The Tonight Show into a new gig as a spokesperson for Miller Lite in a series of self-deprecating commercials. “The first ad, which left him staring with Chaplinesque sadness into a locked saloon, was so successful that it spawned a sequel,” People wrote in a 1983 profile on the Brewers baseball announcer. “In that ad, Uecker gets into the bar—but only by impersonating Whitey Ford.”
The ads were so popular, in fact, that NBC believed there might be interest in a sitcom about a former athlete facing the indignities of life after the game. “One of the reasons Cheers originally got on the air was because of weird ads with former pro athletes (especially the ones Bob Uecker did for Miller Lite),” TV critic Todd VanDerWerff wrote for the A.V. Club. “The beer ads at that time were so popular that NBC hoped it could spin interest in them into interest in a new TV show on the third-place network.”
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As Cheers writer Ken Levine recalled in a blog, the bar's lovable owner Sam Malone was originally conceived as a former football player. “Fred Dryer was more who they had in mind. And he was a finalist for the role (along with William Devane),” Levine wrote. “Ted however, was so charming and there was such chemistry with Shelley Long that they decided to cast him instead. But Ted as a football bruiser is only slightly more believable than me as an NFL lineman so they made Sam a baseball player instead.”
As a charismatic former MLB player with a less-than-illustrious career, Malone shared some obvious similarities with Uecker, and one early episode made those echoes explicit: In season one, Sam Malone lands a gig as a pitchman for a beer on local TV spots.
Of course, Cheers quickly evolved beyond its original premise. As the show went on, Sam's MLB past became less of a focus, but if Uecker's success helped encourage NBC to take a chance on a beloved sitcom that was famously slow to take off with audiences, that's one more achievement we can add to the already very long list of reasons to be thankful for Mr. Baseball.
