Ted Danson has revealed that criticism he received for his role in the TV show Becker is still “hammered into [his] brain.”
During the episode “D’Arcy Carden’s Grandma Has A Crush On Ted Danson” of his podcast Where Everybody Knows Your Name, Danson and his former The Good Place co-star, Carden, spoke about the feedback they’ve received during their career.
Danson revealed that he still remembers negative reviews of him playing Dr. John Becker—an easily annoyed but talented and dedicated doctor who goes the extra mile for those in need.
Newsweek emailed a spokesperson for Danson for comment on Friday.
“Can I tell you some of my reviews? It was after Cheers, it was Becker, and to some degree, I think it’s a truism that after something massively successful, there are some folks out there—especially if the press loved you and the, you know, Cheers—that were kind of laying in wait, I’d like to think that that’s the case,” he explained.
“But Mary and I, it was premier night… Mary and I were in New York so I’d just done all the press for two days and then we were in a car being driven to the airport to fly back to LA for [the] opening night party and watch the show.”
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Mary Steenburgen is Danson’s wife of nearly 30 years.
He continued: “I watch Mary, I’m happy, I’m content, I’ve done my job and, why is Mary slowly moving the stack of newspapers onto the floor, you know? I went, ‘Oh, OK, let me read them.’ … She stutters for a minute and then hands them to me.”
From memory, Danson recalled the headlines verbatim, saying his favorite was “Too tepid Ted” and “Mr. Thinks-He’s-So-Wonderful Danson.”
“These people didn’t like me as much as you do but it was, it was just, it’s hammered in my brain. I will never forget ‘Too tepid Ted,'” the actor quipped.
Carden added: “No the other one is worse for me, ‘Thinks he’s wonderful.'”
The two actors then went on to divulge criticism they’ve received from their own mothers.
“I just remember, I don’t even remember what it was having to do with, but your mom can say whatever. She can call you a brat, she can, moms can get you,” Carden said.
“But there was something about, ‘You’re not as cute as you think you are’ that really stuck with me and might have been the meanest thing she’s ever said to me, but also good to, you know, remember.”
Danson then revealed the criticism he previously received, saying: “I’ve said this on the show before but my mother when asked how she felt about my my success on Cheers in the early days, she said, ‘Well I’m happy for him, of course, but it’s a little foreign to me because I come from a long line of people who believe in the quiet nobil—no—the nobility of quiet failure.”
Danson and Carden both agreed that it was a “great quote.”
Elsewhere in the episode, Danson revealed that when he was filming the first episode of Cheers, he was convinced he was so terrible at his role that he burst into tears.
The actor got his big break on the NBC sitcom, which ran for 11 seasons from 1982 and made Danson a household name. In the show, he played womanizer Sam Malone, who owned the Boston bar where the TV series was set.
But after recording the pilot episode he went up to Cheers co-creator, James ‘Jimmy’ Burrows, and started crying.
“You know what I did when I saw the pilot?” Danson asked Carden. “I pulled Jimmy Burrows aside, and I started crying because I thought I was so bad, and he looked at me for about two seconds and started laughing and walked away in the opposite direction.”
Carden replied, “But what a thing to be a part of,” referring to his role on the iconic sitcom, which is considered one of the best TV comedies of all time.
“I had this moment years after where it dawned on me and I had this ‘holy moly moment’, that I got to play Sam,” Danson said.
