Well, then, I'll just add that to my list of reasons to die

When McLean Stevenson left M*A*S*H at the end of the show’s third season, he did so with all the confidence of a man who did not yet know he was committing career suicide. Like Wayne Rogers, who played Trapper John, Stevenson resented Alan Alda’s growing stardom and the show’s increasing focus on Hawkeye. “I know I will not be in anything as good as this show,” he told Loretta Swit at the time, “but I have to leave and be number one.” Things didn’t quite work out that way. After a decade-long string of one-season failures—The McLean Stevenson Show, In the Beginning, Hello, Larry, Condo—he came to an uncomfortable realisation. “The mistake was that I thought everybody in America loved McLean Stevenson,” he told an interviewer. “That was not the case. Everybody loved Henry Blake.”

What fresh Hell is this?

A spin-off of Cheers was never the plan. By 1993, when the series ended, Kesley Grammer had been playing Frasier Crane for the better part of nine years, and he wasn’t especially keen to keep doing so. The audience wasn’t especially keen on it, either. When Pew Research polled audience members about which Cheers characters they’d most like to see in their own series, Frasier garnered a paltry 2 per cent. But the network wasn’t in love with the idea that Cheers alumni David Angell, Peter Casey and David Lee had come up with—their proposed sitcom about a paraplegic magazine publisher would have been, if nothing else, unique—and insisted that Frasier was a better bet. Loathe though I am to give any kind of respect to the suits, who were doubtless thinking, like the jackals they are, that they could capitalise on the post-Cheers hangover before ignominiously calling closing time, it seems to me that they were right, especially as far as Grammer’s career was concerned. I can’t imagine we’d be talking about him now—except, of course, in the context of The Simpsons’ Sideshow Bob, the other decades-long role he’s made his own—had it not been for the suits’ insistence. It’s certainly telling that, having starred in a string of non-starters since Frasier ended in 2004—Back to You, Proven Innocent, Hank, Partners, The Last Tycoon—as well as the excellent but short-lived Boss, Grammer is once again playing Frasier in the entirely underwhelming reboot. As