Ted Danson gets real about the state of his personal life toward the end of his appearance on “Cheers.”
On a recent episode of his podcast, “Where Everybody Knows Your Name,” the 78-year-old actor gave listeners an idea of what his life was like when “Cheers” ended in 1993.
“People say, ‘What was it like? What did you do after She ended?'” I said, “I messed up my life so much that I didn’t even realize ‘Cheers’ was over,” he said.
Elsewhere in the conversation, Danson admitted that during his time on the hit show last year, he “didn’t really know much about myself” and took “a rapid growth class for graduate students.”
He drove to Long Beach to meet his mentor, whom he called “amazing” and said he provided “a whole different kind of therapy, a kind of spirituality.”
“I wanted to stop lying,” he said. “I wanted to mature mentally. I wanted to change.”
The “Curb Your Enthusiasm” star previously spoke about the end of the series on an August 2025 episode of his podcast and reflected on the state of his personal life at the time.
Asked by guest Charlie Day if he was afraid of being typecast when the show ended, Danson replied, “It was an easy transition because I really messed up my personal life,” and said she didn’t realize the show was ending for several months because “I was just dealing with myself and my personal stuff.”
Danson starred as Sam Malone on the popular sitcom from 1982 to 1993, becoming one of the few cast members to appear in all 273 episodes of the show.
Cheers ended after 11 seasons after Danson expressed a desire to pursue other acting opportunities and executives decided the show should not continue without Danson.
“I was changing for the better, and I had worked so hard for it, so I thought, ‘Maybe I can just jump off the cliff completely,'” he said. “And then it was a little bit like… ‘If I don’t leave now, I might not know what else I can do, and I want to see if I can do something else.'”
After appearing on “Cheers,” Danson starred in “Becker,” “Curve Your Enthusiasm,” “CSI,” and introduced himself to new audiences on “The Good Place.”
He currently stars in the popular Netflix show “Man on the Inside,” where he plays a retired professor who works as an undercover spy in a nursing home.
“There’s something inherently interesting about this 76-year-old man who is a[retired]college professor, whose life is closed off and whose daughter is worried. So she says, ‘Ask me to do a project,’ and he happens upon a project on a whim to be an undercover spy in a nursing home,” Danson told People in November 2024.
