them to pitch us. Nobody wanted to be on NBC. To get Jimmy and the Charles brothers, we knew we'd have to overpromise and overpay, and, boy, did we. That's a pitch meeting I'll never forget. Over breakfast, Brandon Tartikoff, Michael Zinberg, and I first got wind of what would become Cheers. Jim Burrows: Cheers was pitched as a Miller Lite commercial. Those commercials with the jocks, Marv Throneberry and all that. We had an athletic leading man. Sam Malone, originally, was a wide receiver. That's how we pitched it. NBC made a deal for us--two for one. They had to put one on the air. We had to write two. The pitch wasn't too difficult. Since the three of us had run Taxi for about three years, we knew what we were doing, and NBC knew it. It's not like today, where they hire kids who've never run a show, based on one script. Bob Broder: Grant Tinker had hired the Charles brothers at MTM, and they'd worked their way up to executive producers on the final year of the original Newhart show. Jimmy Burrows was a director who hadn't directed television but had been the stage manager in New York for a very unsuccessful musical, Holly Golightly, with Mary Tyler Moore and Richard Chamberlain. It had closed very quickly. Out of that, Jimmy developed a relationship with Mary and Grant, and he begged for an apprenticeship to come out and work with the MTM company. At the time,