Shelley Long's body of work is abysmal

Her role as Diane on Cheers was great but so we're her roles in:
Caveman
Night Shift
Irreconcilable Differences
Money Pit
Outrageous Fortune
Hello Again
Troop Beverly Hills
Don`t Tell Her It`s Me
Frozen Assets
The Voices of Trudy Chase
Fatal Memories
A Message From Holly
Freaky Friday
Brady Bunch movies
Dr.T And the Women
plus a 25 +years worth of guest spots on various television shows. Fairly distinguished career.

And just how many Golden Globes have YOU won?
She has an impressive career.
Your an ass.

That's part of the problem with big breakout roles. She got the role of a lifetime on one of the greatest sitcoms of all time. Then all the calls for movies came and she wanted to be a big movie star. She admitted that it was a mistake to leave the show.

When did she ever admit that? She's always said it was the best thing for the show.

Also, to the OP, while her body of work might not be Oscar-worthy movies, I enjoy a lot of them. Particularly Irreconcilable Differences (a great, underrated movie), The Money Pit, Troop Beverly Hills (an '80s classic now), and The Brady Bunch Movies.

She also had some hits with Night Shift and Outrageous Fortune, but I don't particularly like those ones. I can see why Outrageous Fortune was a big hit, though. I just found Better Middler irritating as hell.

But if you read Ken Levine's blog (he was a writer on Cheers and Frasier) she was ASKED to make that three-second appearance on Frasier, and she did it knowing there would be absolutely no publicity around it. It was kept a secret even from the TV producers because they didn't want any advertisement about it. Levine notes how she had a full shooting schedule, but was still happy to do it.

I agree, though. She had more potential than her post-Cheers career gave us. Hated Hello Again and that Boyfriend School piece of crap. She turned down a few roles that probably would have catapulted her to a lasting movie career. She was offered the role of the boss in Working Girl and the mom in E.T.

She kind of got black listed when she left Cheers. They hated her for leaving a hit show even though she was on it for five years! It was unfair and she became unmarketable. Her popularity from Cheers no longer existed so they didn't have that to sell a movie.

The only abysmal thing here is the OP.

Outrageous Fortune and Money Pit are classics. Shelley was an amazing movie star and the only thing about Cheers that I liked.

I really dont get the popularity of Cheers.

Its a one trick wonder.

Sure theres a lot nice decoration around the central conflict Diane Chambers vs Sam Malone. And the show lingers on endlessly after Chambers departed.

But really the show should have ended when Shelley Long left it. There really wasnt much else going on there.  The central conflict had been resolved, albeit in a disappointing way.

Either way I think after 4 or 5 seasons the whole setup would have become stale anyway.

Pretty much like in The X Files. Those lingered on endlessly too, but frankly after four or five seasons I was simply stuffed. Its just obvious they can never get to a conclusion of the plot in X Files because then the show would end.

One of the shows who did it best was Stargate: SG-1. Yes, they hunted down this damn Anubis for eight seasons for no good reason; why they did that eluded me because they could have just killed System Lord after System Lord instead. But there was so much extra content going on that the main plot wasnt really actually driving the show, and they kept having outstanding single episodes. Stargate: Atlantis managed it really well, too, except it was rudely interrupted after five seasons. Both Stargate shows also benefited a lot from strong lead actors, too. On Atlantis is was even a single one; Dr McKay was the center of the action and completely hillarious.

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