Reception
Shelley Long has received one Emmy in 1983 and two Golden Globes in 1983 and 1985 for her leading performance as Diane Chambers in the series Cheers. Long was nominated as Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for the series finale "One for the Road" and did not win in 1993.
In 1990, Robert Bianco praised Diane and Shelley Long for making the show a "classic" and was devastated that she left the show, along with Nicholas Colasanto's death, which lessened Bianco's praise on the show. In 1993, John Carman from San Francisco Chronicle found her guest appearance in the series finale neither well-performed nor well-aged. In 1999, Diane was rated number 33 on TV Guide's 50 Greatest TV Characters list. In 2011, Kim Potts from The Huffington Post ranked her No. 30 of the top 100 "Greatest TV Women" of all-time.
On the other hand, in 1987, Monica Collins from USA Today called Diane a "snitty, selfish snob" and was relieved that the character left the series. According to Collins, she has not made friends with people in Cheers onscreen. More often, she has not befriended women, and she has " men more than them". In 2002, Bill Simmons, previous writer of ESPN, praised Diane's early years but found her becoming "overbearing". In 2009, Andrea Zimmerman from Lemondrop website ranked Diane No. 5 in the "20 Least Feminist TV Characters" for chasing after Sam to prevent her own insanity. In 2012, Steve Silverman from the Screen Junkies website considered her "too needy and insecure for anyone, to have a legitimate relationship with."
In the book Primetime Propaganda, author Ben Shapiro represented Diane Chambers as an "elitist liberal" of a "high culture" and "the conscience of the show and solid feminist", who outsmarts Sam over morality. Diane's taunting toward Sam and his class " the first inkling of the yuppie conundrum that would haunt liberals throughout the 1980s." Shapiro considered Diane becoming "sexualized" and "liberated" when, in the Season One episode, "No Contest" (1983), when she accepts prizes that she won, including two tickets to Bermuda. Jennifer Michael Hecht in her book, The Happiness Myth, depicted Diane as herself too "unhappy" to be taken seriously as an adviser and her psychoanalysis on Sam's promiscuous behavior as "unreliable".
Diane's appearance in the Frasier episode, "The Show Where Diane Comes Back" (1996), was reviewed in the fan dedication website, Frasier Online. Two reviews found Shelley Long's performance in Frasier "overplayed" and overacting and not the same as how she portrayed Diane in Cheers when she was a regular character. Nevertheless, Diane's reconciliation with Frasier at the end was praised. In the same website, reviews praised her another Frasier appearance in "Don Juan in Hell" (2001) as part of Frasier's imaginative evaluation about his troubled love life.
Read more about this topic: Diane Chambers
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)