4 Pre-’Cheers’ Roles in Which Ted Danson Plays the Bad Guy
Everybody loves Ted Danson. Starting with Cheers, he’s been the star of about a dozen different hit shows, in which he’s almost always charming and lovable (even when he plays the devil). Pre-Cheers, however, Danson wasn’t always so likable. In fact, he was mostly the bad guy.
Here are four times Danson was the heel before he was Sam Malone…
‘The Doctors’
Before moving into prime time, Danson spent several years acting in daytime soaps, including this role as a smug know-it-all psychiatrist on The Doctors. In the clip above, he comes off as a flirty creep even when he’s discussing the case of a traumatized kid.
‘Magnum P.I.’
Before Danson and Tom Selleck played two-thirds of the dads in Three Men and a Baby, they squared off in an episode of Magnum P.I. In it, Danson plays a conman trying to bilk an old lady out of her savings.
This Shaving Cream Commercial
In a bizarre ad for Rise shaving cream, Danson appears to be a guy sleeping with a married woman, only for it to be revealed that the woman’s dad is on the way home, not her husband. Regardless, Danson still comes off as a sleaze with a bizarre obsession with shaving cream.
‘Taxi’
The team behind Cheers was the same team behind Taxi, which is where Danson first appeared on their radar. On Taxi, he pops up as a gay hairdresser who gives Elaine (Merilu Henner) a terrible haircut that he refuses to fix. Not only does Danson play an unlikable asshole, there isn’t a gay stereotype he doesn’t indulge. At the end of the episode, Danny DeVito’s Louie DePalma pours a bowl of red dye over Danson’s head, and the studio audience explodes into applause.
Just a few months after this episode aired, Danson would transform into one of the most beloved leading men in TV history, but here, he totally had it coming.