The 1980s role that nearly “blacklisted” Ted Danson from Hollywood: “Don’t hire him”
Having been a near-ubiquitous presence on the small screen for over 40 years, it’s almost impossible to imagine the modern television landscape without Ted Danson being a part of it.
While that might sound like an excessive way to describe someone who’s never been regarded as the best actor, the biggest star, or the most must-see performer in the industry by any stretch of the imagination, Danson has literally made history for his never-ending contributions to television.
When Netflix’s A Man on the Inside premiered in November 2024, he became the first actor to notch 13 leading roles in regularly scheduled scripted primetime TV shows, snatching the long-standing record away from Robert Urich, who played a dozen recurring roles on the gogglebox before his death in 2002.
A highly specific role? Absolutely. One that casually glosses over Danson’s inability to crack the silver screen and make a name for himself in movies that’s even remotely comparable to his TV success? Definitely. Still, history is history, and clearly, the man loves himself a steady gig on the telly.
There have inevitably been some setbacks, like the Cheers veteran sabotaging himself out of the male lead in Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist, in what would have been a huge boon to his big-screen prospects, after getting the shit kicked out of him by Tom Selleck in an episode of Magnum PI.
Not all of those recurring roles have been winners, either, with one of them convincing Danson that maybe it was time to turn his back on the sitcoms that had served him so well when he started to believe that he’d lost his mojo and wasn’t funny anymore.
However, he’d have no chance of becoming a record-setting TV star had NBC followed through on its threats to blacklist him from the network in the early 1980s. Had that happened, he wouldn’t even have been allowed to audition for Cheers, the gig that turned him into a household name in the States.
After starring in a failed pilot, where he played one-half of a father-daughter detective duo in San Francisco, the top brass were less than impressed with what they saw, which is putting it lightly. “I got blacklisted for Cheers from NBC,” Danson recalled. “I mean, a memo to everybody: ‘Don’t hire him.'”
Acknowledging that the pilot was awful, all of the blame was placed squarely on his shoulders. While he couldn’t remember the name of the executive, he still remembers what they said: “It sucked, and he blamed me for that, and, literally, there was a memo.” Clearly, a memo that wasn’t accepted as law, since he was cast as Sam Malone, who he’d play for 11 seasons.
