“I’m gonna stop doing this”: the 2006 role that convinced Ted Danson he was “no longer funny”
It’s not an exaggeration to call Ted Danson one of the defining figures of the modern sitcom, with the actor becoming as synonymous with laugh-tracks and a live studio audience as anybody else.
He’s not quite Lucille Ball, but he’s not too far off, either. Danson might even be on an even keel with his hero, Dick Van Dyke, having dedicated the last four and a half decades of his life to the format, to such an extent that he’ll always be known as a sitcom guy, first and foremost.
Even if he gave it up after Cheers, his legacy would have been secured. As the top-billed name and patron of the bar where everyone knows your name, he was the face of one of the most-watched TV shows of its generation, but since he never managed to crack the big screen, he continued returning to the well.
They weren’t all hits, but holy shit, he’s been in a lot of them. His first post-Cheers comedy didn’t go so well when Ink was cancelled after one season in 1997, but he bounced back with Becker across six years and almost 130 episodes, before becoming a fixture of Curb Your Enthusiasm, even though he thought it sucked at first.
Bored to Death got three seasons, The Good Place got four, Mr. Mayor got two, and Netflix recently renewed A Man on the Inside for a third, which goes to show how much Danson has made the format his home. They can’t all be winners, though, but one of them failed so miserably that it caused him a full-blown existential crisis.
Premiering in September 2006, Help Me Help You starred Danson as Bill Hoffman, an egotistical therapist who deals with his own problems as much as his patients. By December, the show had been pulled from the airwaves entirely after airing nine of its 13 episodes, but it was a slow death, with ABC not officially pulling the plug until May 2007.
Reflecting on its failure, the actor had become so unsure of himself that he was ready to abandon comedy for good. “It didn’t work out, then it was like, ‘Oh, I’ve stayed at this half-hour party too long,'” he suggested. “I’m no longer funny. I’m not amusing myself. There are people doing really amazing, funny stuff. I’m gonna stop doing this.”
It was obviously a short-lived thing, seeing as Bored to Death debuted on HBO less than two and a half years later, but after his sitcom setback, Danson turning his hand to more dramatic fare and joining Glenn Close’s legal thriller Damages as a series regular for its first three seasons was just the tonic he needed.
“Damages gave me the thing,” he revealed. “It took the bored out of my butt.” That’s one way of putting it, but it was career-saving stuff nonetheless, with Danson having appeared in no less than nine different comedy shows of various shapes and sizes since Help Me Help You was given the boot.
