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Shelley Long became a star thanks to Cheers. Playing Diane Chambers shot her into the stratosphere. Winning an Emmy for her first season helped, to be sure. Back in the 1980s, TV stars would often desire to be movie stars, because TV was seen as “lesser.” Long tried, going as far as to leave Cheers, but it did not work out. What is interesting to me, and perhaps only to me, is her greatest success as a movie actor came in a pair of movies goofing on a TV sitcom.
Even factoring in The Money Pit, which came out in 1986 before Long left Cheers, her movie career was not successful or remarkable. In 1987, her final season on Cheers, she starred in Hello Again and Outrageous Fortune. I literally couldn’t tell you anything about either of those movies. Her first foray into “I’m in movies now” is her biggest success, Troop Beverly Hills. That “success” was a flop that is barely remembered, and only remembered fondly by woman on the Gen X/Millennial threshold. After that, it was the fiasco Don’t Tell Her It’s Me and then a 1992 movie called Frozen Assets co-starring another failed movie star Corbin Bernsen that I found out existed as I wrote this paragraph.
After that, though, came The Brady Bunch Movie and A Very Brady Sequel. Those weren’t big hits, but they are cult classic comedies now. They were the best of the “What if we did a winking homage to the sitcoms we grew up on?” that abounded in Hollywood in the 1990s. Long played Carol Brady, and she nails it. She’s a lot of fun, and threds the needle of playing Carol mostly straight, but with a bit of a wink.
It’s almost like Long’s skill set was built for lead roles in sitcoms. Huh.
