Thought members of Screen-l in the US and overseas who would notsee Toronto's The Globe and Mail, (the "paper of record" in Canada) might find this preview/review provocative. a la prochaine. Mary Jane Miller The following is the Globe review. "LEAVING THE AIR WITH LITTLE CHEER LEFT. CHEERS HAS CHANGED over the past 11 years and the changes have reflected the social and political shifts in America. The one constant has been Sam Malone-like a cartoonish American icon, he's all jock dumbness and easily fazed by any concept more complex than getting the-girl. In fact, Sam stands for sweet, dumb, sexy America itself. It's fitting that Sam should close the bar for the last time during the first months of a new political administration in the United States. As a TV show, Cheers is the ultimate eighties emblem. It began when there was a frantic urge to forget Jimmy Carter and ends when the dazzle of the Reagan-Bush years looks like a fraud. The show's progress as a prime time political analogy can be charted by examining the two great loves of Sam's life-Diane Chambers and Rebecca Howe. In its first few seasons Cheers was mostly about mocking Diane. She was the precise personification of an element of America that was on the wane-liberal, cultured and wary of machismo. Although she was a graduate student and at once innocent and earnest, she didn't represent the counter-culture of the universities. Instead, she was Carter-culture incarnate. It was a long. slow dance of romance between Sam and Diane, but when it happened it had the glow of true intensity There was a poignant air about the affair because it was Sam who reluctantly adapted to Diane. Of course, the romance was clearly doomed to failure. The arrival of Rebecca Howe was a radical dislocation in the cozy Cheers communily and it served to represent a sharp shift in America itself. Rebecca's preening obsession with mbney and corporate manoeuvres and her romance with the cold, amoral millionaire Robin Colcord were perfectly in keeping with the late eighties love affair with greed and corporate cowboys. The show itself became meaner. The jokes became cruder-without Diane's commitment to some sort of refinement, the sensibility seemed coarse, even grotesque. Sam's extended, calculated seduction of Rebecca was a girly magazine fantasy given life, and the sniggers of the surrounding barflies became the giddy giggling of small boys understanding their first dirty joke. As Cheers developed and changed over the seasons the roles of the supporting characters also became clearer and more fixed. Carla, foul- mouthed and fecund, stood for the vitality of America's immigrant, multicultural lifeblood. Cliff symbolized the pedantic, obtuse character- istics of all bureaucracy. Norm was the permanent, self-satisfied layer of white, lower-middle class America, forever content with its basic comforts. Frasier Crane came to illustrate the baby boomer generation in all its neuroses and fads. These pieces of the American puzzle surrounded Sam Malone as if he were the ultimate Uncle Sam, to whom they all pledged allegiance. It is fitting that Shelley Long should return for the final episode. The show needs a little heart to help it depart with grace. All of the fringe customers in the bar will be played by network executives, producers and bean counters. Cheers has become theirs anyway and it leaves the air with little cheer left. By John Doyle Cheers wraps up Thursday on Global at 9 p.m. 70440, NBC 8488 Broadcast Week, May 15-21, 1993" Thus endeth the quote. Mary Jane Miller Mary Jane Miller, Dept. of Film Studies, Dramatic and Visual Arts, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, L2S 3A1. Phon;e (416) 688 5550 ext 3584, Fax: (416) 682 9020, e-mail: [log in to unmask]