Norm Peterson was one of the regular patrons on Cheers, but where did George Wendt, the
actor who played him, go after the bar closed up?
We've got the details right here.
While Cheers was still on the air, Wendt began appearing in a series of sketches on Saturday
Night Live as Bob Swerski, a diehard Chicago sports fan and host of the show "Bill Swerski's
Superfans."
"Da Bears!"
Wendt is a Chicago native himself, and as a lifelong supporter of all Windy City sports
teams, he was instantly relatable to any other local fans who were watching.
The sketches originally aired in the early nineties, shortly before Cheers ended in 1993.
But that wasn't the end of Bob Swerski or his passionate commentary on Chicago sports.
Wendt has returned to SNL to play Swerski several times, with a total of nine appearances
between 1991 and 2003.
He's also shown up in character as Bob outside of SNL.
In 2019, for example, he stopped by the ESPN+ series Peyton's Places, in which Peyton Manning
meets with a variety of interesting figures to explore the history of football and the
cultural impact of the sport.
"Baby Peytonmy son, are you ready to be baptized into the Bears superfandom?"
"Well, I'm not drunk, so no.”
A couple years after Cheers ended, Wendt got his own starring sitcom gig.
Alas, The George Wendt Show reached nowhere near the success of Cheers, airing for only
one season on CBS in 1995.
Perhaps a sitcom actually based around Norm Peterson, whom the audience already knew and
loved, would've been a better move.
It took a few years after The George Wendt Show wrapped for Wendt to nab another regular
TV gig.
In 1997, he appeared on the sitcom The Naked Truth for three episodes.
Then in 2001, he appeared on another comedy show, but this time, it was a series with
a different kind of audience than he was used to, as he checked in for six episodes of Sabrina,
the Teenage Witch.
And in 2006, he was on the one-season WB sitcom Modern Men as a guy who dished out dating
advice to confused, single men, even though he'd been through a few divorces himself.
None of the shows that Wendt worked on after leaving Boston really got the same reception
that Cheers did, but of course, that's the type of iconic show that doesn't come around
very often.
And Wendt knows it.
While reflecting on the show's enduring popularity, he told the Toronto Sun in 2017,
"It's such a pleasant surprise that something you were a part of could make such an impact."
Besides Cheers, Wendt's longest-running TV gig in terms of episode count was on the TBS
sitcom Clipped.
He played Buzzy, a guy who used to own a barbershop named, naturally enough, Buzzy's.
In the show, he still works there, but now the place is owned and managed by a fellow
named Ben.
Back in the day, Ben was an unpopular kid in high school, but now that he's the boss
at Buzzy's, he's in charge of a few of his old classmates.
Naturally, jealousy and petty antics ensue.
As for Buzzy, he might be beyond all that high school drama, but he's got relationship
problems of his own, like figuring out how to propose to the man of his dreams.
The show ran for ten episodes in the summer of 2015 and was officially cancelled a few
months after the last episode aired.
On Cheers, George Wendt starred alongside some pretty impressive names in the world
of comedy.
But recently, he's started working with someone even more important to him: his wife, Bernadette
Birkett.
The couple starred together in a 2013 production of the comedy play Never Too Late.
The original version of this show was popular on Broadway in the 1960s, but it's not a very
well-known play today.
However, Wendt and Birkett's version was well-received and positively reviewed.
In the play, Wendt played Harry Lambert, a successful and traditionally-minded man who
owns a lumber company and thinks that his wife, Edith, truly enjoys waiting on him hand
and foot.
But when Edith comes home with news that she's pregnant, Harry is totally caught off guard.
Wendt and Birkett were praised for bringing their real-life chemistry to the stage.
Robert Trussell of The Kansas City Star noted,
"The bombastic Harry is the showier role, but Birkett goes for relatively subtle humor
in a precise, thoughtful performance.
For his part, Wendt delivers a master class on comedic timing."
Although most of Wendt's acting work has been on TV, he’s had plenty of film credits to
his name as well.
His career started with bit parts in movies, and he appeared in a couple films that you
probably enjoyed as a kid.
In 1994, for example, he had a memorable supporting role as a lumberyard clerk in The Little Rascals.
And of course we can't forget Spice World, in which he played one of the guys pitching
film ideas for the girls to star in.
Wendt's more recent film credits include the 2017 Adam Sandler Netflix vehicle Sandy Wexler
and the comedy The Climb, which screened at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival.
He's also got multiple projects in post-production.
And maybe one day we'll see the return of Norm and the rest of the gang on the big screen.
When The Toronto Star asked him in 2017 about the possibility of a Cheers reboot, he said,
"I think some sort of reboot is inevitable, whether it's a movie or a show."
Alas, he also added,
"But I wouldn't hold my breath."
"Well, hear hear, huh?"
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