Season 3 of "Cheers" enriched television history in a lot of ways, most notably by introducing Kelsey Grammer as psychiatrist Frasier Crane while also bidding an off-screen farewell to Nicholas Colasanto, the actor who played Coach. (Colasanto died near the end of the season, and while Coach's character was kept alive via outtakes for remaining episodes, he essentially disappeared from "Cheers" before the commencement of year 4.)
Grammer's beloved character, who remained on NBC for 20 unbroken years (including the long-running "Frasier"), is ushered into the "Cheers" family when he meets barmaid Diane Chambers (Shelley Long) in a very funny, Emmy-nominated episode suggesting the neurotic course of their future romance. Meanwhile, Sam (Ted Danson), having fallen off the wagon due to his own tempestuous love affair with Diane, has to endure Frasier's questions about how to be intimate with the brainy babe. Elsewhere in "Cheers"' sardonic community, Cliff (John Ratzenberger), in a sweet but barbed episode, meets a woman (Bernadette Birkett) at a costume party and is afraid of re-introducing himself later. Norm (George Wendt) becomes aware of his mortality and decides to move to Bora Bora, and Sam (in another Emmy-nominated show) has to explain how he got shot in his posterior. Other good things: "The Heart Is a Lonely Snipe Hunter," in which the men of "Cheers" cruelly initiate Frasier in the manly art of snipe-hunting, and "Bar Bet," starring Jacqueline Bisset as a woman Sam must marry before a certain date or lose the bar forever. "--Tom Keogh"