"Give Me a Ring Sometime" is the premiere episode of the American situation comedy series Cheers, written by Glen and Les Charles and directed by James Burrows. The episode first aired on September 30, 1982, on NBC as part of its Must See TV lineup. The pilot introduces employees of Cheers in order of appearance: Sam Malone, Diane Chambers, Coach Ernie Pantusso and Carla Tortelli. In addition, the regular customers, Norm Peterson and Cliff Clavin, are introduced. In the original script, the employees were the principal characters, and Norm and Cliff did not exist. Later revisions added Norm and Cliff as part of the pilot, and the scenes were restructured and rewritten. In this episode, Diane, brought in by her fiancé Sumner Sloan, meets all employees and patrons of the bar. When she realizes that her fiancé has jilted her alone in the bar, Diane takes Sam's offer to be the bar's waitress in order to start over.
The show was also part of NBC's Thursday lineup, which eventually became Must See TV, along with Fame, Taxi, and Hill Street Blues. The ratings were low when this episode originally aired, but the network reruns improved. Moreover, this episode has been critically praised over the years, and it earned its writers accolades for Best Writing in 1983.
Read more about Give Me A Ring Sometime: Casting, Production, Plot, Ratings, Critical Reception, Accolades
Famous quotes containing the words give me a, give me, give and/or ring:
“Give me the splendid silent sun
with all his beams full-dazzling,
Give me juicy autumnal fruit ripe and red from the orchard,
Give me a field where the unmow’d grass grows,
Give me an arbor, give me the trellis’d grape,
Give me fresh corn and wheat, give me serene-moving animals teaching content,”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“Give me chastity and continence, but not quite yet.”
—St. Augustine (354–430)
“Slim: Give her my love.
Harry: I’d give her my own if she had that on.”
—Jules Furthman (1888–1960)
“What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)