Pilot Zone - The Tortellis

History will say that Cheers was a very successful show that had a very successful spin-off - Frasier - and there is no denying there is truth to this, but most people - I bet even avid Cheers watchers at the time - don't know that Frasier wasn't the first spin-off, you have to go back to 1987 when The Tortellis had a 13 episode run.

Now I went into The Tortellis with very low expectations - I had heard it was terrible - and to be honest because of these expectations what I watched wasn't terrible, I mean I can see why it didn't last - I mean the four who came over from Cheers where entertaining in small doses but you could see spending 30 minutes with them every week as getting tiresome fairly quickly.

We do have a Cheers regular show up in the shows opening scene, and it's unsurprisingly his ex-wife Carla, who appears in Nick's dream which is about him in the afterlife (other info I could find said Norm and Cliff show up in a later episode).

There is an attempt to make Nick more likable, because it was clear from his Cheers appearances it wasn't always his most notable trait and even as Nick getting upset when Loretta's sister Charlotte makes fun of an accomplishment of his. Speaking of Charlotte she seems to fit the typical sit-com staple of snarky friend (or this case sister-in-law) and even has the cute kid troupe of her own.

Though it was a failure, it was an admirable attempt to make a sit-com out of one of the lower-life recurring characters on Cheers and maybe the US sit-com world was just not ready for a main character so rough around the edges.