There Will Never Be Another Norm Peterson, Because There Are Few Norms
CHEERS — "Cliff's Rocky Moment" Episode 16 — Air Date 01/26/1984 — Pictured: (l-r) John Ratzenberger ... More as Cliff Clavin, George Wendt as Norm Peterson (Photo by NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images)
Who was Norm Peterson? You're aging yourself if you know the answer to the question. More realistically, you aged yourself by clicking on an opinion piece with 'Norm Peterson' in the title.
About what's been written so far, rest assured that none of it is meant to tell readers about a show that they already knew and loved (again, you clicked on a piece about a fictional individual), and none of it is meant to rehash Norm's many great lines. Others have and will do all this much better.
Instead, the purpose of this opinion piece is to make a case that Norm doesn't solely resonate with older readers because of the years when Cheers aired. The speculation is that only older people could and did get Norm in the way that young people simply could not.
To see why, think again about Norm's character. The bar where everyone knows his name is his refuge from the day-to-day drudgery of his job as an accountant. Some will say Cheers was a refuge from Vera (the wife we never saw) too, but for 'The Peterson Principle,' the episode in which Norm defended Vera's honor.
Norm loved Vera, but not his job. He wasn't a Formula 1 driver, an executive for the Red Sox, or a professor in a city filled with them, Norm was an accountant. He was in a job about which he wasn't passionate. Which is no insight.
At the same time, it's not unreasonable to point out that a younger watcher of Cheers wouldn't get Norm in the way that people got him from 1982-93. That's because Hollywood, however imperfect, is a mirror. Which requires a brief digression.
Likely more than a few who knew and loved Cheers either read The Great Santini, or saw the film. One reason it resonated is that readers and moviegoers understood Robert Duvall's character. Either they had fathers like him, their fathers had fathers like him, or perhaps both. Fast forward to the present, and while it's no reach to say that young people would really enjoy the novel or film, they wouldn't know Bull Meacham. There's no context. Fathers are nice, and getting nicer by the day. The view here is that the kindness of fathers today is not unrelated to the likelihood that young people today wouldn't get Norm.
What they wouldn't get about Norm is his lack of passion for his job. Again, Norm came to Cheers to get away from a job that was work. The view here is that Norm made sense as a character in the '90s, and by extension made sense to viewers, exactly because he didn't like his work.
Norm wouldn't make sense today because as I wrote in my 2018 book The End of Work, the nature of work has changed so much, and is set to rapidly change even more. See AI. Precisely because it will render so much of today's work redundant, AI will free exponentially more from work that has to be done in favor of work that people can't not do. There's a huge difference, and the view here is that the misery of past work explains difficult fathers of the past in much the same way that rapidly improving work explains the much easier fathers of today.
Which is a comment that there will never be another Norm Peterson not just because George Wendt played him so perfectly. More optimistically, there will never be another Norm because the Norms of the past are more likely to be found happily working than escaping it at the bar.
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New York Times
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The titles were often gloriously creative and diverse, some paying homage to terrace anthems, others making a clever play on words. Sales were decent, too, with more than one million copies shifted per year at the height of what quickly became a phenomenon. We're talking about the rise of football fanzines in the 1980s. Those purveyors of insight and irreverence who arrived on the scene when the game was on its knees in a troubled decade and helped spark a revival. Advertisement Not just through fan activism, though there was plenty of that as fanzines joined the fight against compulsory ID cards, club mergers, and even proposals for a new European Super League featuring England's biggest names more than three decades before the more recent incarnation reared its ugly head in 2021. But, by giving supporters a long overdue voice at a time when they were considered pariahs by wider society, fanzines revealed those on the terraces to be intelligent, passionate people who had something to say beyond the cliched ''Ere We Go!' battle cry so beloved of the tabloid newspapers when generalising fans as hooligans. 'What fanzines did was offer an alternative voice that represented a much broader variety of perspectives on footballing culture,' says Kenn Taylor, part of the team behind Voice of the Fans, a new exhibition at Leeds Central Library exploring how fanzines helped change football. 'They critiqued clubs and critiqued aspects of footballing culture. But they also celebrated it and brought a really different kind of perspective. They allowed different groups of fans, some of whom experienced prejudice, to express themselves to show that they exist, too.' There had been earlier versions of fan magazines. 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Soon, though, this early trickle of new titles had turned into a flood, with When Saturday Comes, surely the wise old grandfather of them all these days, first hitting the streets in 1986. Before long, every professional club in the UK had at least one publication chronicling their failings or otherwise and Sportspages, an independent book shop just off the Charing Cross Road in London piled high with fanzines from across the UK, became a tourist destination in itself as fans clamoured to buy the latest copy of Hit The Bar, The Gooner or Elm Park Disease. Visitors to Sportspages at the height of this publishing boom may also have enjoyed the artistic debut of future big names such as Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh and Libertines singer Pete Doherty, who wrote for Hibs Monthly (Hibernian) and All Quiet On The Western Avenue (Queens Park Rangers) respectively in their formative years. The Voice of the Fans exhibition claims that by 1992, more than 600 fanzines had appeared. 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Associated Press
an hour ago
- Associated Press
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