I'm Alan Alder and this is Clear and Vivit. Conversations about connecting and communicating.

Hi, I'm here with our producer Graham Chet and we're going to give you a look at what's

coming up in season 17 of Clear and Vivit. I love this lineup of people we have with

that I'm talking to, don't you, Graham?

We're great and we know that because you've already sat down in our virtual studio with

some six or seven of them. So we thought in this preview of the season we'd play some

clips from some of those that we've already recorded.

We're starting with someone who's been in your life if you've watched hit television

comedies at all for the last few decades. If the getting is start on the Mary Tyler

Morshow James Burrows brought a series like Friends, Cheers, Taxi, Will and Grace, Frazier,

The Big Bang Theory and that's just a name a few of the more than 1,000 shows he's directed

or helped create. And he has stories about all of them. We both had shows that started

low in the ratings and then worked the way up and we compared notes about that. I was

really interested to see in your book that Cheers at the beginning was near the bottom

of the ratings. That was exactly what happened to us on Mash. I used to tell people we're

in the top 72. And then all of a sudden it turns around. What happened on Cheers, do you

know? Because it became a national event when by the time the series ended.

Right. Both Mash and Cheers, there was absolutely no reason to watch them.

Because you didn't know who was in them.

Nobody was a star in your show and nobody was a star in Cheers. You had a movie going

for you. We didn't have that. And back there on the television there was no internet. It

took a while for shows to catch on because people had to be shopping and to see people

...