The actor Ted Danson wished he hadn’t spent 30 years hating: “I feel like it’s my bad”
For the most part, Ted Danson has navigated his impressively lengthy acting career without ruffling too many feathers or causing too much controversy, although there was a 30-year rift that he needed to resolve.
We say ‘for the most part’, because there was that time when he wore blackface, ate watermelon, and dropped several racial epithets during a 1993 roast of his then-partner, Whoopi Goldberg, even if she defended him from the backlash and said she helped him write some of the speech.
Apart from that, though, he hasn’t caused issues with co-stars, colleagues, or filmmakers, even if he did feel sorry for Larry David because he thought Curb Your Enthusiasm “absolutely sucked” the first time he saw it, although his mind was eventually changed, and he became a recurring fixture on the show.
It’s been almost 45 years since Cheers premiered, and Danson is still taking top billing in TV shows, most recently Netflix’s A Man on the Inside, so he’s clearly been doing something right to spend so long as a staple of the small screen without ever disappearing from the public consciousness completely.
Several regulars at the bar where everybody knows your name would go on to become big stars, and as close as the leading man remained to many of his co-stars in the ensuing years, including Woody Harrelson, it would be almost three decades before he mended his broken fences with Kelsey Grammer.
“I feel like I got stuck a little bit with you during the Cheers years,” he explained when the Frasier star guested on his podcast. “I have a memory of getting angry at you once, and it stuck in both of our memories, but I feel like… Fuck, I don’t know, I missed out on the last 30 years of Kelsey Grammer.”
“I feel like it’s my bad,” Danson continued. “My doing, and I almost feel like apologising to you. No, I don’t feel like, I apologise to you and me that I sat back and didn’t, and I really do apologise.” Graciously, Grammer accepted his offer of atonement, drawing a line under the simmering tension that had been brewing between them since the early 1990s.
For his part, Grammer recalled that he’d been called out for Danson, who thought he’d turn up to the set less prepared than the rest of the cast. “Now, maybe what happened for Ted was he stepped away from what might have been a better friendship,” he reasoned. “I don’t really know. But, I said, ‘Thanks’. We were fine with that.”
A little apology goes a long way, and while it might have taken him 30 years to issue it, Danson was finally able to right a wrong that had haunted him since his Cheers days, smoothing things over between himself and Grammer at long last.
