Who was Norm Peterson? You’re aging yourself if you know the answer to the question. More realistically, you aged yourself by clicking on an opinion piece with “Norm Peterson” in the title.
About what’s been written so far, rest assured that none of it is meant to tell readers about a show that they already knew and loved (again, you clicked on a piece about a fictional individual), and none of it is meant to rehash Norm’s many great lines. Others have and will do all this much better.
Instead, the purpose of this opinion piece is to make a case that Norm doesn’t solely resonate with older readers because of the years when Cheers aired. The speculation is that only older people could and did get Norm in the way that young people simply wouldn't.
To see why, think again about Norm’s character. The bar where everyone knows his name is his refuge from the day-to-day drudgery of his job as an accountant. Some will say Cheers was a refuge from Vera (the wife we never saw) too, but for “The Peterson Principle,” the episode in which Norm defended Vera’s honor.
Norm loved Vera, but not his job. He wasn’t a Formula 1 driver, an executive for the Red Sox, or a professor in a city filled with them, Norm was an accountant. He was in a job about which he wasn’t passionate. Which is no insight.
At the same time, it’s not unreasonable to point out that a younger watcher of Cheers wouldn’t get Norm in the way that people got him from 1982-93. That’s because Hollywood, however imperfect, is a mirror. Which requires a brief digression.
Likely more than a few who knew and loved Cheers either read The Great Santini, or saw the film based on the novel. One reason it resonated is that readers and moviegoers understood Robert Duvall’s character. Either they had fathers like him, their fathers had fathers like him, or perhaps both. Fast forward to the present, and while it’s no reach to say that young people would really enjoy the novel or film, they wouldn’t know Bull Meacham. There’s no context. Fathers are nice, and getting nicer by the day. The view here is that the kindness of fathers today is not unrelated to the likelihood that young people today wouldn’t get Norm.
What wouldn't ring true about Norm today is his lack of passion for his job. Again, Norm came to Cheers to get away from a job that was work. The view here is that Norm made sense as a character in the ‘80s, and by extension made sense to viewers, exactly because he didn’t like his work.
Norm wouldn’t make sense today because as I wrote in my 2018 book The End of Work, the nature of work has changed so much, and is set to rapidly change even more. See AI. Precisely because it will render so much of today’s work redundant, AI will free exponentially more from work that has to be done in favor of work that people can’t not do. There’s a huge difference, and the view here is that the misery of past work explains difficult fathers of the past in much the same way that rapidly improving work explains the much easier fathers of today.
Which is a comment that there will never be another Norm Peterson not just because George Wendt played him so expertly. More optimistically, there will never be another Norm because the Norms of the past are more likely to be found happily working than escaping it at the bar.
