Ted Danson And Kelsey Grammer Squashed A 30-Year-Old 'Cheers' Beef

The older I get, the more fascinated I become by friendships. I’m not friends with anyone I grew up with or friends from high school. Part of that is because my family moved around until I was ten. I attended a theater conservatory in lieu of college, and in that year and a half made some intense friendships that I thought would last forever. Little things that happened here and there made those relationships dissolve over time. There are some regrets, but they are not enough to pick up the phone.

There is a kind of ease in pruning relationships from your life, even if you don’t do it on purpose. The older you get, the more responsibilities you have. You or your friends begin to move away from your shared locale. You get busy, and not having to keep up with all of your friends on top of that is a relief. You don’t want to close your social circle entirely, but making it smaller is reasonable, especially with age. The trick is deciding whether or not to repair a relationship when given a chance.

I don’t know if the friends I have lost over the years will ever have a chance to forgive, forget, or simply reconnect. I’m not sure if any of us want that, even if we have said we do. Regardless, many factors will keep that from happening. Keeping friendships can be hard, letting them go can be easy, and repairing them can be damn near impossible (for good and bad). That is, unless, you have a successful podcast with which to invite a friend to squash a years-old beef.

Kelsey Grammer and Ted Danson appeared on the hit sitcom Cheers. For all we’ve known, it was an enjoyable experience. However, as Danson revealed when Grammer appeared on his and Woody Harrelson’s podcast, Where Everybody Knows Your Name, he and Grammer have not had much of a relationship over the years, and Danson is taking the blame for it. “I feel like I got stuck a little bit with you during the Cheers years. I have a memory of getting angry at you once,” Danson explained on the pod. “Yeah, you came and told me that one day,” Grammer responded quickly.

They did not go into detail about what made Danson mad, but the Good Place actor took responsibility for it. “It’s stuck in both of our memories,” Danson told Grammer. “But I feel like I missed out on the last 30 years of Kelsey Grammer and I feel like it’s my bad, my doing. I apologize to you. And [to] me that I sat back… I really do apologize.” Grammer kindly accepted, adding that he also wished they had spent more time together, but adding, “My love for you has always been as easy as the day. As easy as the sunrise.” Then, they moved on.

Maybe it’s because I was thinking about old friendships in writing this, but this moment between these two men I don’t know made me very emotional. They talked, Ted apologized, and Kelsey accepted it with love. Regardless of thoughts on either gentleman, it’s a lovely thing to watch. Maybe mending some friendships isn’t as hard as I thought. It takes someone being willing to take that first step. If the love is there, it will break through. It always does.