By Lili Loofbourow — Sure, “Cheers” billed itself as a place where everybody knows your name. But there was really only one name everyone in that famous TV bar knew. It belonged, of course, to Norm (née Hilary) Peterson, the amiable beer-swilling barfly played by George Wendt, and everyone roared it whenever he wandered in with a cheerful, “Afternoon, everybody.” Wendt died Tuesday at 76, leaving behind his wife, Bernadette Birkett; three children; and a legacy as one of television’s most lovable everymen.
Norm may have looked simple, but Wendt understood from the start that the character was a paradox. A misfit who’d finally found his place, Norm was wry but never mean, routinely delivering many of the show’s best lines without seeming to quite understand how extremely funny he was. Norm’s offhanded bon mots were the opposite of Frasier’s labored witticisms, for instance (the stuffy psychiatrist played by Kelsey Grammer). They felt spontaneous, casual, effortless.
Norm’s brilliant one-liners also somehow weren’t, in-universe, the reason for the character’s popularity; it’s not like the folks shouting “Norm!” immediately crowded around him to listen to his stories. Far from acting like the life of the party, or working the room to get laughs, Norm was constitutionally unassuming and beleaguered. Trapped in a rat race professionally, he characterized his marriage (to Vera, the wife audiences heard but never saw) as a living nightmare. Outside the microcosm of the bar, he seemed to see himself as mediocre and inadequate. And whenever his professional world intruded, he radiated anxiety and a fear of being found out.
But at Cheers, he seemed at ease. On every one of the legendary sitcom’s 275 episodes, Wendt conveyed both how urgently Norm craved escape, oblivion and acceptance (or – as he so succinctly put it – “beer”) and how Cheers helped him blossom into someone he couldn’t be outside. You could practically see the stress melting off him as he settled onto that bar stool.
It was kind of lovely, though I don’t think I appreciated it at the time, to watch a character thatfragile and anxious walk into a bar and bask in the glow of acceptance, suddenly still and comfortable in his skin. Wendt performed that transformation in episode after episode, and that small but subtle victory did a lot for “Cheers,” which wasn’t a show about winners. The bar was a haven for people licking their wounds and trying on identities they’d flubbed in the real world. There was a lot of hapless striving.
In Wendt’s capable hands, Norm seemed like the exception that proved the rule. He wasn’t visibly working to impress anyone, like John Ratzenberger’s Cliff. Or trying to be one of the guys, like Frasier. He wasn’t clever and long-winded like Shelley Long’s Diane, and he wasn’t naive like Woody Harrelson’s Woody.
But the key to Norm as a character was that he wasn’t just being himself, either. Wendt, who got his start at Second City, where he worked with the likes of Danny Breen and Del Close (and befriended Brandon Tartikoff, who would become the head of NBC’s entertainment division), figured out early on that, deep down, Norm was trying – even at Cheers. He valued his status there greatly, and while he may not have rehearsed jokes, he did fudge the truth quite a bit over the course of the show to impress the gang. His complaints about his wife, Vera, for instance, turned out to be lies meant to help him fit in with the crew; he actually adored her. Seen one way, that twist proved that even Norm had a sly and scheming side. Seen another, it suggests that Norm, who was already quite a softy, was even sweeter than he seemed.
It’s “Cheers” lore that Wendt was the guy James Burrows and Glen and Les Charles had in mind for Norm when they left “Taxi” to write a sitcom set in a bar. Like Wendt, Norm was a Chicago native. (The character’s name was initially George.) But Wendt was on a CBS show called “Making the Grade,” which, thankfully – given how heavily “Cheers” influenced subsequent sitcoms – got canceled after only six episodes.
Wendt had a long and successful career, including a stint in theater. I watched (and enjoyed) his turn as Yvan in “Art” when he was performing in the West End back in the late ’90s almost as much as I enjoyed the silly little diary he wrote about the experience for the Independent, in which he said, “Norm was an amazing part to play, but Yvan in Art gets to talk a lot more. It’s odd being the loquacious one for a change.”
But Norm Peterson was his biggest contribution, and he embraced that with humility and humor, even in his last year of life. In a recent reunion with Ted Danson and Harrelson on their podcast, “Where Everybody Knows Your Name,” Wendt pointed out that his real-life wife, Bernadette, voiced Vera and played Cliff’s love interest in the episode where he dresses up as Juan Ponce de León.
Wendt looks exhausted, but the detail with which he recalls this and other episodes throughout the interview is striking. (Many such reunions feature cast members who can barely recall entire storylines.) At one point, Danson started describing how Nicholas Colasanto (who played Coach) had started writing his lines down around the set to deal with cognitive decline, and how the cast broke down when they returned to set after his death and found one such line: “It’s almost as if he’s still here with us.”
“The show was about, that he had just lost his friend, a lifelong friend his age,” Danson says, trying to remember specifics about the episode.
“T-Bone Scappagioni,” Wendt says, instantly – not in a show-offy way. Just matter-of-factly, in that perfect Norm Peterson cadence.
