Ted Danson's Best Performance In A Sitcom Is Still A Top 10 Television Scene
Although Cheers might be Ted Danson’s most famous comedy show, the star’s best TV scene came from an entirely different brand of sitcom. Ted Danson has been a mainstay on the big and small screen for decades, from his breakout supporting roles in movies like Body Heat and Creepshow through to his iconic comedy movies Three Men and a Baby and Three Men and a Little Lady. However, for fans of great American sitcoms, he will always be best known as Sam Malone, the protagonist of Cheers.
A womanizing bartender who was a baseball pitcher until a drinking problem derailed his career, Sam was a flawed but well-meaning sitcom protagonist who influenced later characters from How I Met Your Mother’s Barney Stinson to Ted Lasso’s title character. Before The Office US’s popularity led to a slew of sitcoms starring lovable dim-wits, Sam Malone set the standard for the charismatic ladies’ man who was not so secretly a mess under the surface.
Viewers had a lot of goodwill toward Danson after Cheers ended, and the star put this to good use when he took on the deuteragonist role of the angel Michael in The Good Place. An NBC sitcom that debuted in 2016, The Good Place arrived at a time when everything from Lucifer to Supernatural was injecting biblical stakes into police procedurals and horror shows. As such, the show’s high-concept premise was perfectly timed.
The Good Place’s Big Season 1 Ending Reveal Is Ted Danson’s Best Work
Created by Parks and Recreation/Brooklyn Nine-Nine mastermind Michael Schur, The Good Place focused on a more existential sort of bureaucracy than the writer’s earlier workplace sitcoms. The show’s heroine was Kristen Bell’s amoral opportunist Eleanor Shellstrop, a woman who is shocked to find herself in Heaven, the eponymous “Good Place,” after her sudden and untimely death. There, she soon finds out that the paradisical afterlife isn’t what it was cracked up to be, thanks in large part to its struggling angel architect, Danson’s Michael.
Like Danson’s sweet, good-natured characters from Cheers and Three Men and a Baby, Michael is a well-meaning guy who is a little too incompetent to get it together. This seemingly explains how not only Eleanor, but also the terminally indecisive Chidi, the uncaring drug dealer Jason, and the wealthy, self-absorbed socialite Tahani all made it into his version of Heaven despite their obvious character flaws. Thus, Tahani spends The Good Place season 1 working out how to help Michael improve this iteration of Heaven, while Eleanor and Jason secretly plot to ensure they won’t be kicked out of Heaven.
Anyone familiar with the iconic anthology series The Twilight Zone might know where this story is going, thanks to the legendary outing season 1, episode 28, “A Nice Place to Visit.” In that neat, nasty parable, a crook ends up in Heaven after he is shot in a robbery gone wrong, but soon finds he is bored by the predictability of life in the “Good place” and wants to visit the “Other place” to see his friends.
In a twist that still chills some 66 years after the episode initially aired, his seemingly sweet guardian angel cackles gleefully and reveals that he’s been in the “other place” all along. While this moment remains one of the all-time great horror TV reveals, The Good Place somehow managed to outdo the gag at the end of season 1.
The Good Place’s Twist Slyly Relied On Ted Danson’s Established Screen Persona
In season 1, episode 13, “Michael’s Gambit,” the quartet of main characters are stuck in an impossible bind as they are forced to choose which of them will go to Hell and endure an eternity of unimaginable torment to save the rest of the group. It is only when Eleanor realizes that the attempts to decide on a sacrificial member amount to psychological torture that she understands the truth.
As Eleanor confronts Michael with the reality that the group has been in the “Bad Place” all along, Danson’s hapless hero feigns bemusement before cracking a grin and laughing at their horror. Michael’s laugh during the reveal is one of the all-time great moments in sitcom history, up there with Homer’s best line in The Simpsons, precisely because of how effectively the show subverts his established screen persona.
The Good Place season 1 built its entire premise on Danson’s Cheers persona to convince viewers Michael was a harmless, blundering good guy and not a manipulative villain, and managed to throw the audience off the scent of what could have been a glaringly obvious twist in the process. If Michael’s guileless questions about morality were any more pointed, viewers might have guessed at the sinister secret underlying all his supposed mistakes.
However, the fact that viewers spent decades watching Danson’s lovable goofballs stumble through life without a plan inured them to the reality of what Michael was getting away with under their noses. Upon a re-watch, it is glaringly obvious that Michael is manipulating Eleanor, Chidi, Jason, and Tahani throughout season 1, but Danson’s daft, artless, cheery exterior leaves viewers completely blindsided by the reveal.
In an interesting twist, the following seasons of The Good Place redeem Michael, revealing Danson’s fallen angel to be a complicated, conflicted character who does have a heart underneath his scheming. However, in season 1’s finale, Danson is genuinely unnerving when Michael’s malicious side is finally revealed. Like The Fresh Prince of Bel Air’s best episode, this iconic sitcom benefits from playing this scene a little more seriously, as it makes the twist all the more effective.
The bombshell revelation that Michael has been behind all the supposed Good Place’s flaws all along, and that he has meticulously planned all the stresses the group has been put through, is a masterclass from Danson. In the years since the show wrapped up, the star has taken on the lead role in two further sitcoms, 2021’s Mr. Mayor and 2024’s A Man on the Inside.
Both shows see Danson return to the amiable goofball persona he is best known for. However, only one was a critical success. Mr. Mayor was a dull retread of familiar territory for the star, and most critics agreed, calling the sitcom inessential. However, A Man on the Inside reunited Danson with Schur and managed to replicate The Good Place’s critical success in the process.