Ted Danson and Woody Harrelson’s new podcast, Where Everybody Knows Your Name made its debut on Wednesday, June 12. According to their iTunes description, the podcast gives Woody and Ted the opportunity ”to reconnect, both with each other and the amazing friends they’ve each met over the decades”. Their inaugural guest is none other than Will Arnett.
During the episode, Woody reveals that he’s a huge fan of Arrested Development. He even recounts a story in which he and Will were at a dinner party at Bono’s house and Woody held up dinner because he had to reenact the Season 4 scene where GOB proposes to Egg Ann. Will responds by enthusiastically telling his hosts that he’s pretty sure he’s the biggest Cheers fan ever. Ted confesses that he wasn’t much of an athlete growing up so co-creator Jimmy Burrows gave him some advice on how to play former major-league pitch Sam Malone. He basically told him that players love touching their private-area, so Ted took his direction and decided Sam would also grab his crotch to look realistic. Things really get funny, though, when Woody decides to share with the class the new word he’d learned the night before: “BDE.”
Cheers star Ted Danson is revealing some audacious advice he got from series co-creator and director James Burrows on how to convincingly portray his character, the smooth-talking barkeep Sam Malone, as a former major-league pitcher.
“Jimmy Burrows helped me really by saying, and it got me a lot of close-ups too, ‘Just reach down and grab yourself periodically in the nuts,'” the actor recalled on Wednesday’s episode of the new Cheers podcast Where Everybody Knows Your Name. “Athletes, for some reason, touched themselves a lot.”
“Did he really?” the episode’s guest star, Will Arnett, asked.
“He did say that, yeah,” Danson replied.
Cheers castmate and podcast cohost Woody Harrelson then interrupted to ask if Arnett or Danson had ever heard the term “BDE,” which stands for “big dick energy.”
“I don’t know if you’re able to say things like that,” Harrelson acknowledged, before pointing to Danson and stating that “he has that in spades. He’s a real leading man.”
“He had that BDE for sure on that show,” Arnett quipped, “and I have BSE, which is ‘big snuggle energy.'”
The clip of the exchange, which you can watch below, is really funny. They were giving major Big Dad Energy during the exchange, lol. I cannot believe that Woody has never heard of BDE before! He’s not wrong though. Sam Malone had some major BDE, as does Ted IRL. As for Ted’s decision to method act as a real crotch-grabbin’ baseball player, good for him, I guess? I always assumed that male athletes touched their junk a lot because they were adjusting their cups. I haven’t watched Cheers in probably 10 years, and I honestly cannot remember him doing that! Whenever I do a rewatch or happen to catch it on TV somewhere, that’s literally going to be the first and only thing I look for. Thanks to Woody’s observation and vocabulary lesson, Ted’s BDE is coming full circle.
Photos credit: Getty, United Archives/IFTN / Avalon, Nick Agro / Avalon
I enjoyed Cheers, but like most sitcoms of that time, the women were either after-thoughts or used as punchlines. Maybe that’s still the case now, I just am not a sitcome watcher anymore. I have enjoyed Ted Danson as an actor but can’t forget the event where he used blackface.
I echo your thoughts. I watched it back in the 80s and thought it was funny and laughed, but there was only like three channels back then – – cheers was all we had! If somebody told me now to watch a sitcom about a bunch of slobs in a bar, who constantly harass the waitresses, it would be a hard no.
“If somebody told me now to watch a sitcom about a bunch of slobs in a bar, who constantly harass the waitresses, it would be a hard no”
This is how I feel about It’s Always Sunny… but people praise that show.
Flakk–Thank you for saying that! It’s Always Sunny is a racist, sexist sh*t show.
It’s Always Sunny is very clearly making fun of racism and sexism and how stupid and short sighted it is, rather than condoning it. The characters are supposed to be horrific people with very few redeeming qualities, who you don’t want to emulate.
Cheers is more of a product of its time. There are some really good jokes in the show, which still hold up, but the criticisms of it being wildly sexist are completely fair. It was. It also started airing in 1984 and, well, think about what the world was like in 1984.
I remember wondering as a kid why athletes seemed to do that so often, and no one seemed to care or make fun of them, but if I did it (again, child; I had an unfortunate skin reaction to soap that took a while to diagnose) and people saw it (they always did), I would get made fun of. It’s hard being an 8-year-old!
Mom with three sons and two grandsons, who all play(ed) baseball. It’s absolutely to adjust their cup. For some reason, those things move around a lot, lol.
I rewatched the whole thing several years ago while working on a stitching project and was surprised at how well it held up, especially the first few seasons. Clever, above-average writing and character development, especially for those times. If you said ‘Sam and Diane’ everyone knew who you were talking about.