Three’s Company had the Regal Beagle, a bar that was sometimes treated like a place where dangerous types might dwell, but again, no one told the set designer. This looks like one of those fancy joints where they won’t let you in unless you’re wearing a tie and both shoes.
DLT Entertainment
The next step in the evolution of the sitcom bar came when the son of Duffy’s Tavern co-creator Abe Burrows came up with a bar show of his own, along with writers Glen and Les Charles: Cheers, best known to Millennials as that show you try to sit through when you run out of Frasier episodes.
This was a somewhat more realistic depiction of a bar compared to what we’d seen on TV before, complete with the occasional acknowledgement that sometimes, people who hang out at bars every day have addiction issues. Even Frasier started hitting the bottle too much at one point, although he never went through anything as dramatic as the mini metal breakdown Norm suffers when he finds out someone else has dared to sit on his stool.