CHEERS SEASON 1 AND PILOT EPISODE

Season 1 of Cheers relies on more than  what wound up making the show a legendary fan-favorite series... when it first started gaining high ratings and opened up beyond a small handful of critics who hoped it would go beyond the initial season, which by now, everyone has seen, but mostly in reruns... When it first aired, Cheers was the kind of show only few knew about... Having been a fan of Taxi, produced and written by many of the same people, I was tuned in from the very beginning... Going back, I had forgotten that much of what drove this season is Sam and Diane, but not the neurotic (and yes, sometimes annoying) sexual relationship that begins in Season 2...

Rather, Diane seems to be on the sidelines, constantly reminding Sam that he's not so wonderful while she, at the same time, is more flawed than anyone... In a way, this first season is a lot like Laverne & Shirley... You have a confident, sexually-active leader who makes many mistakes while being constantly checked by a nervous counterpart who's afraid to really live, and both need each other to basically survive... Also different in the first season, Norm and Cliff aren't yet Norm and Cliff, or even Cliff and Norm... Like Happy Days took a little while before Potsie and Ralph became a team, Norm's more on his own here while Cliff shows up sporadically, not yet the full-blown equal-share character, and he isn't even billed in the opening credits... And to narrow it down, this pilot is one of the great openings of TV history... Everything is shaped from within the first fifteen minutes, the only difference is that Diane is the newcomer white-rabbit leading us into her accidentally newfound wonderland, soon becoming our own... Being dumped by her fiance, she winds up where we'd be for 11 seasons, six of those without the very person who brought us here...

Sure, Cheers would improve in many ways, when it became an almost equal ensemble instead of a romantic-situation-comedy with the barflies on the side, but, then again, there's nothing like these early Coach episodes (the first two seasons especially, before he got noticeably ill in season 3)... And best yet, there's nothing quite like Season 1, before everybody knew their name. Year: 1982 Rating: ****1/2

ANOTHER SIMPLE FAVOR

Blake Lively in ANOTHER SIMPLE FAVOR Year: 2025 Rating: **

Chalk this up as one of the most unnecessary sequels ever made. The original, Paul Feig's modern-film-noir-comedy-thriller, was a nice little surprise, and worked especially during the first half as single mommy/blogger Anna Kendrick begins an investigation... 

Turning into a kind of girl-crush/lightweight-obsession with older and downright beautiful Blake Lively, providing both intrigue and suspense, and even sensuality, the only drawback being the casting of Lively's husband, who Kendrick cheats with, an actor seeming more suited to a sitcom... 

Blake Lively in ANOTHER SIMPLE FAVOR

Well he's only briefly joined by the two returning leads on a tropical island paradise... in what's more like the Knives Out sequel setting than a locale providing a logical continuation of the first film's deliberately over-bright suburbs... which director Feig served-up with an equal amount of genuine-suspense and crime-genre-satire... 

Making this new balmy location and the entire film itself a distraction to the fact that nothing really happens, as in, there's no real investigation to pull in Kendrick or the audience this time around. 

Anna Kendrick in ANOTHER SIMPLE FAVOR