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I while back I told you about a DVD collection with the best commentary tracks I've come across (The Best of Gunsmoke Volumes 1 & 2). Last night I discovered what must be the worst commentary track ever.

Roseanne Season 5 sports a couple of episodes where Roseanne is seen in a square in the corner watching the episode and making comments. But she has almost nothing to say about what's going on on the screen or behind the scenes. Just comments about her hair extensions and, 'that was a funny line.'

However the shows themselves are fantastically funny, with storylines that unfold like a soap opera. Roseanne might be the best sitcom of all time for my money, I started watching with season 6, followed by season 7, then went back to seasons 4 & 5.

I'm doing the same thing with Cheers, another sitcom that holds up well today depending on what season you're watching. I'd only seen a couple of episodes of the first season when the show first debuted, although I can't imagine under what circumstances since I don't think I owned a TV set in 1982.

Anyway, thanks to DVD, I started watching Cheers a few months ago beginning with the sixth season, that was the first without Dianne Chambers (Shelly Long) and I found myself enjoying it quite a bit.

There were plenty of hearty laughs during that year so I started watching the first season - now THAT was a wonderful show, it's easy to see why Cheers became such a monster hit. Nicholas Colasanto's performance as Coach was priceless and the emsemble cast seemed to click right away. It seems as if the characters were fully drawn from the very beginning.

For me it was Coach that really provided the wind for the sails, there's a good reason why he was nominated for an Emmy every year he was on the show. When Colasanto passed away in 1985, producers replaced him with a younger model (the similarly dim-witted character Woody was a friend of Coach's who came to visit and ended up with his job.)

I skipped to the fourth season which suffers from the cutes. Everything and everyone got so precious and loveable. Aaawww - Norm sings with a Barbershop Quartet. Aaawwww - Carla interviews her teen daughter's date. Aaaawww - they're having conversations about old TV shows. And the Sam & Diane show was getting stale.

It was my understanding that the cast encouraged Shelly Long to quit the series; they just wanted her gone for the sake of the show (she was hell to work with) so they cheered her on to persue a film career that ultimately went nowhere.

With the weakest link removed for year 6, Cheers became an edgier comedy, developing the infinitely more interesting supporting players like Dr. Frasier Crane, Lilith, Woody and the rest.

Although still wildly better than most of what's on today, by the seventh season the jokes became stuck in a particular rhythmic pattern - setup, joke. You almost expect a drummer to be just off camera doing rim shots with every other line. Cheers, which redefined the modern sitcom, seemed to become a near parody of itself with a too-predictable pitter pat.

I'm anxious to dip into season 8 to see where the show went and if it got better but I'm especially looking forward to watching season 2 and 3.

As an aside, I remember when when I was working in the movie poster biz, one of the many films we were working on during the Christmas holidays was Camp Beverly Hills. Shelly Long, the star of the film, was kind enough to send over a huge basket of chocolate chips - potato chips that is, dipped in white chocolate. It was a nice gesture.

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