Hope Sterling: Okay, long week, but I genuinely do not care right now because I found something — or like, it found me — and I've been low-key obsessed since Tuesday.
Juniper Vale: Tuesday obsession, that's a long simmer — what is it?
Hope Sterling: React to this: Cheers debuted on NBC on September 30th, 1982 — but three years before that, September 1979, a Boston sitcom called Park St. Under was already airing on WCVB-TV. Set in a bar. Near a subway station. In Boston. Ran until May 1980 and then just... stopped.
Juniper Vale: The same premise — like, not in the same ballpark, actually the same premise?
Hope Sterling: A subterranean bar near the Park Street subway station versus a Boston bar beneath a transit landmark — I mean, yeah. Nearly identical geographic branding. And whether Glen and Les Charles, who created Cheers, or James Burrows, who directed it — whether any of them ever watched Park St. Under or even knew it existed? Genuinely unresolved. Nobody's answered that.
Juniper Vale: That gap in the record is kind of remarkable on its own.
Hope Sterling: Right — but here's what I keep getting stuck on. Cheers flopped when it premiered. Like, badly. And NBC kept it alive anyway. Park St. Under gets one season on a local station and it's over. So what was actually different — was it the show, or was it who had the resources to let a show fail?
Juniper Vale: Yeah, that's the thing that makes this more than just a trivia question.
Hope Sterling: Ted Danson becomes an icon. Park St. Under becomes... almost nothing. And we're going to try to figure out why.
Juniper Vale: But that question — resources versus quality — that's actually where I want to slow down, because I think the framing gets muddy fast. Think of it like this: imagine two equally talented food trucks. Same menu, same cook. One parks on a single corner in your neighborhood. The other gets a deal to operate in every airport in the country. Same food. Completely different reach. That's the gap between WCVB-TV and NBC.
Hope Sterling: Okay but wait — wasn't WCVB actually like, a legitimately great station? Because I feel like we keep saying 'local' like it means scrappy and underfunded.
Juniper Vale: That's the complication that breaks the easy version of this story. The New York Times published a profile in 1981 calling WCVB-TV arguably America's best local television station. That's not a footnote — that's a national newspaper saying this Boston station is exceptional.
Hope Sterling: STOP. The Times said that?
Juniper Vale: 1981. Which means WCVB had the reputation. What it didn't have was a syndication pipeline. No national promotional muscle. No mechanism to put Park St. Under in front of anyone outside Boston.
Hope Sterling: So quality and distribution are just — they're like two completely separate variables. You can max out one and still be invisible.
Juniper Vale: Exactly that. The people behind Cheers weren't just talented. Glen and Les Charles and James Burrows had already made Taxi work on NBC. So when they walked into NBC with Cheers, they weren't strangers. The institution already trusted them.
Hope Sterling: Oh, so it's like — Taxi was basically their key card. They already had the door open.
Juniper Vale: A key card with a track record attached. And that track record is what got NBC to keep Cheers alive when it flopped. A local station can't do that — WCVB couldn't have sustained a failing show through a second season hoping it'd find its audience. There's no safety net at that scale.
Hope Sterling: Which means — and this is the part that's kind of messing with me — even if Park St. Under had been brilliant, like genuinely brilliant, the structure makes survival almost impossible without that network floor underneath you.
Juniper Vale: Right — but I want to sit with how uncomfortable that is. Because we look at Cheers' 28 Emmys and eleven seasons and we think, obviously, that was the great show. But greatness and survival are not the same variable either.
Hope Sterling: So the premise being good — the Boston bar near the transit landmark, all of that geographic branding — that was necessary but it wasn't even close to sufficient.
Juniper Vale: You needed the right people with the right relationships already inside the right rooms. And Park St. Under, whatever it was, didn't have that pipeline.
Hope Sterling: But the flopping part — like, can we actually sit with that for a second? Because I don't think people realize how bad it was. Cheers premieres September 30th, 1982, and it literally gets described as having 'flopped like a flounder.' That's not a soft opening. That's a disaster.
Juniper Vale: And NBC kept it anyway.
Hope Sterling: NBC kept it anyway! Which means — okay, think about what that actually required. Like, someone in a room at NBC had to look at the numbers and go, 'no, we're staying.' That's not a creative call. That's a budget call. That's a leverage call.
Juniper Vale: It's institutional patience. And institutional patience costs money that WCVB just didn't have at that scale.
Hope Sterling: I want to make this really concrete. Picture a producer at WCVB in May 1980. Park St. Under is getting canceled. And she knows — she has to know — that the show had Boston audiences. Like, people were watching it in Boston. But there's no mechanism, there's literally no structure at a single-market station to say 'give it another season, it'll find its legs nationally.' That option doesn't exist for her.
Juniper Vale: She's not even making the wrong call — there's no call to make. The infrastructure just doesn't have that lever.
Hope Sterling: Exactly. Whereas Cheers gets to fail. And then fail a little more. And then eventually — eleven seasons, ranked in the Nielsen top ten seven times, 28 Emmy Awards. But only because someone with very deep pockets decided the flounder was worth keeping.
Juniper Vale: Wait, do we even know if WCVB tried to sell Park St. Under to a national network? Like, is there any record of that?
Hope Sterling: That's the thing — the sources just don't say. There's no record of them trying, but there's also no record of them not trying. It's a silence. And I don't know if that silence means 'they knew it was impossible' or 'it genuinely never occurred to anyone to try.'
Juniper Vale: And either way, the outcome for Park St. Under is the same.
Hope Sterling: One season. September '79 to May 1980. Gone. No second act. No slow-burn recovery arc. That runway just — it wasn't there.
Juniper Vale: Which honestly makes me want to ask something we haven't touched yet — because the survival question connects to something even weirder about how this all gets written into history afterward, and I think that part is actually going to break your brain.
Hope Sterling: Wait, what do you mean 'written into history' — like, who decides what counts as a classic? Because if that's where you're going, I need a minute.
Juniper Vale: That's exactly where I'm going — who decides. Because here's what actually happened after Park St. Under disappeared: Cheers got rerun, got written about, got studied academically. Every repetition is another vote in the 'this matters' column. Park St. Under got none of that. There's almost no documentation of its content, its cast, its critical reception — like, surviving in any widely accessible source. It's basically gone.
Hope Sterling: Wait — like gone gone? Not 'hard to find,' actually gone?
Juniper Vale: Almost entirely. And that's — I mean, that changes the whole conversation, right? Because we've been asking 'was Park St. Under as good as Cheers' and the uncomfortable answer is we genuinely cannot know. We can't assess it. We don't have the material to assess it.
Hope Sterling: Okay that is actually unsettling. Because that means we might be telling the story of a great show that got buried — or we might be telling the story of a show we're just assuming was great because its premise looks like Cheers from the outside. And there's no way to check.
Juniper Vale: Both are possible. And sitting with that uncertainty is, I think, the more honest place to land.
Hope Sterling: But wait — so Cheers being remembered as an institution, the 28 Emmys, the academic studies, all of it — that's not just a consequence of being great. That's a consequence of syndication, of reruns, of NBC having the promotional scale to keep putting it in front of people until it became canonical. Like, the canonization is a structural output, not a quality output.
Juniper Vale: That's exactly it. Archival preservation, syndication access, promotional repetition — those are the mechanics. And national networks hold all three levers. A single-market station like WCVB doesn't.
Hope Sterling: Even though — and this still gets me — the Times literally called WCVB arguably America's best local TV station. In 1981. National reputation, no national machinery. Those are just two different things that don't connect.
Juniper Vale: Think of it like this: imagine a film professor in 1995, building a syllabus on American sitcoms. She can pull Cheers from syndication, find academic papers, screen clips in class. Park St. Under is — there's nothing to pull. It's not that she decided it doesn't count. The record just isn't there to count.
Hope Sterling: So the erasure isn't even malicious. It's just — passive. The infrastructure never preserved it, so it never got argued about, and if it's never argued about, it never gets defended into the canon. It just falls through.
Juniper Vale: And Cheers didn't fall through because NBC's resources created the downstream conditions — the reruns, the coverage, the repetition. Glen and Les Charles and James Burrows coming in with Taxi on their résumé didn't just open the door to production. It opened the door to the whole preservation apparatus that comes after.
Hope Sterling: So Boston had this hyper-local show that served the city specifically — like, Park St. Under was for Boston in a way Cheers, once it went national, literally could not be. And then Cheers comes along, universalizes the exact same concept, and becomes national property. Does Boston win there? Or did the city just lose ownership of its own story?
Juniper Vale: That's — yeah. That's the regional identity question and I don't think it has a clean answer. Cheers made the Boston bar a global icon. But that's a very different thing from what Park St. Under was doing for a Boston audience in 1979.
Hope Sterling: We treat Cheers' greatness like it was inevitable. But the actual evidence is that it required NBC's patience through failure, the Charles brothers' Taxi credibility, the syndication machine — none of which Park St. Under ever had access to. That's not a story about quality winning. That's a story about who gets to survive long enough to be remembered as great.
Juniper Vale: And that's the thing. Not on a lesson, just — the premise alone was never going to be enough. Two bars, two transit landmarks, same city. Three years apart. The premise was the same. The infrastructure was not.
Hope Sterling: The premise was identical and one of them has 28 Emmys and the other one we literally cannot watch because the record is just — it's not there. Like, that's the whole thing, isn't it. That's it.
Juniper Vale: I keep thinking back to where this started — you said 'it found me' on Tuesday. And the reason it found you, the reason this story is even findable, is because Cheers got syndicated and written about and studied. Park St. Under found nobody after May 1980. Not because it was nothing. Because nobody preserved it.
Hope Sterling: Ugh. Yeah. NBC kept a flounder alive and now it's canonical. WCVB — nationally celebrated, the Times said so — couldn't give Park St. Under that same chance. Like, the flounder survived. The other thing just... didn't get to flop.
Juniper Vale: Didn't get to flop. That's a weird thing to say but it's exactly right.
Hope Sterling: It's such a weird thing to say! But like — failing gracefully, failing with a safety net, that was the luxury. And it wasn't available. Not at a single-market station, not without Glen and Les Charles walking in with Taxi already on the résumé. Park St. Under didn't have any of that. And now we can't even assess whether it deserved it.
Juniper Vale: That part genuinely unsettles me. We don't know what we lost. We can't know.
Hope Sterling: We genuinely cannot know. And I think that's — I mean, that's where I'm sitting with this. Not angry exactly, just... a little unsettled. Thank you for going down this with me, by the way. I needed someone to help me figure out if I was losing my mind.
