"The writing was so crisp, and it was funny, but it was also insightful.
"They owed us nothing and had no reason to stick with us, but I guess they heard something they liked." As the songwriting pair continued chipping away at it, Portnoy found inspiration by reading the "Cheers" pilot script. "Thankfully, the Charles brothers said, 'Take another try at it,'" Portnoy recalls. They had no choice but to start from scratch.īut "Cheers" co-creators Glen and Les Charles (who were coming off a hit in "Taxi") weren't ready to give up. The duo tried altering "People Like Us" just enough to avoid any legal issues, but the "Cheers" producers didn't like the result. Great, right? There was just one problem: The producers of "Preppies" owned the rights to "People Like Us" and wouldn't let Portnoy and Hart Angelo take it elsewhere. It was one of those weird Hollywood connections."Īll Portnoy and Hart Angelo had to do was rewrite the lyrics, the producer said, and "People Like Us" would become the "Cheers" theme song. I think that my co-writer had a friend at a television production company, and he was married to one of the producers. The story begins in the fall of 1981, when Portnoy and Hart Angelo were writing songs for a Broadway musical called "Preppies." One of those songs, "People Like Us," attracted the attention of a Hollywood producer, who reached out to them wanting to use it as the theme for a new NBC sitcom called "Cheers." To this day, Portnoy still doesn't know how the song made its way to that producer's desk: "About ten people have taken credit for that. But one that ends happily: with the creation of one of the best TV theme songs of all time. And he told us a story almost as long and convoluted as one of Cliff Clavin's meandering tales. With the "Cheers" theme heading into the Final Four of our Theme Song Thunderdome bracket, we spoke to Portnoy (who also sang the theme) this week about how "Where Everybody Knows Your Name" came to be. It took a few false starts and countless revisions, but songwriters Gary Portnoy and Judy Hart Angelo eventually crafted a timeless theme song: "Where Everybody Knows Your Name," the sentimental, piano-driven bar ballad that preceded all 275 episodes of "Cheers." In fact, it was a different song entirely. Here's a little-known fact: The "Cheers" theme song started out sounding much different than the one we know and love.
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