‘Too Long; Didn’t Watch’: Lena Dunham Toasts ‘Cheers’

Welcome to the latest episode of Too Long; Didn’t Watch, a new podcast produced by Rolling Stone and OBB Sound, presented by Google Assistant, and hosted by yours truly. In each episode, we attempt a new method of scaling Peak TV, by pairing a celebrity guest with a series they’ve never seen and showing them only the very first and very last episodes, to see if they can figure out what in the world happened in between.

This week, we have our first showrunner in the chair. She just also happens to be an actor, writer, director, social-media lightning rod, and, just maybe — depending on your sense of humor — a voice of a generation, somewhere. I’m speaking, of course, about Girls creator Lena Dunham, who chose for this episode a series whose debut she wasn’t even alive for: Cheers, the iconic sitcom that inspired countless will-they-or-won’t-they romantic comedies on the small screen — including Girls itself.

Dunham’s selection allowed us to revisit choices she made about about Hannah and Adam on Girls. And where Cheers basically turned into its own spinoff after Shelley Long left midway through its run, the return of Diane for the finale made our podcast experiment less confusing than, say, when Kumail Nanjiani had to muddle his way through the last CW episode of Veronica Mars. Did Dunham prefer Cheers‘ original cocktail of ingredients, or the one served at last call? Listen to find out!

You can subscribe now to Too Long; Didn’t Watch wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, Acast, Google, TuneIn, and Pocketcasts. If you like what we’re doing, please rate and review us on the platform of your choice. You can also stream the latest episode right here:

Back next week with another special guest to talk about Breaking Bad, a show I know so well, I literally wrote a book about it!