Where everybody knows your name

It's an idea situated somewhere between a hare-brained scheme and a stroke of a genius - to create a Spanish version of Cheers, the US sitcom that broke molds, borders and new audiences back in the 1980s. At first, it indeed sounds crazy, but if you spend a few hours on the set where the 26 episodes planned for the first season are currently shooting, the idea starts to take shape, make sense and, finally, provoke a few laughs.

Directed by filmmaker Manuel Gómez Pereira and with a cast headed by cinema and small-screen veteran Antonio Resines and Alberto San Juan, Cheers is searching for a miracle: that spark of memory that will light the flame for a new story.

The original Boston bar comedy saga is now the stuff of legend. It started off on a bad foot but the network decided to weather the initial storm. What came afterwards was a rain of big numbers and success: the show lasted 10 years, comprised 276 episodes spread over 11 seasons, was nominated for 117 Emmys and won 26.

It is searching for a miracle: that spark of memory to light the flame for a new story

"The skill was that Cheers wasn't a typical bar. They formed a family"

In 1993, one of its characters, Frasier Crane, became the star of his own spin-off show, Frasier, in which he abandoned Boston to encounter his real family and a respectable job as a radio psychiatrist in Seattle, leaving behind a bar that had become the epitome of American life, the capital of Massachusetts and a good vibe. As the show's popular theme song said, Cheers was the place "where everybody knows your name."

When the Sex and the City and Friends tours of Manhattan did not yet exist, there was already the Norm hamburger (named in honor of the character whom everybody used to greet in unison) and dozens of bars were looking to turn their premises into that extension of your living room that seducer Sam Malone's drinking hole had become.

It wasn't difficult to feel affection for its lonely clientele who spent the day talking about their petty affairs and revealing their misery. "For me it was the great skill of the series. It wasn't a typical bar. They formed a family," says Carlos Martín, one of the brains behind the Spanish remake.

Martín headed the team of scriptwriters that went scrupulously through the 276 episodes of the original series in order to adapt it to another time and place. "We have a card for each episode, with its structure, its characters and the gags that we most liked." The main difference in the structure of the episodes (which hover around 28 minutes) is that while in the original Cheers there was a single plot and a single running gag per installment, in the Spanish version there will be two plots and a mixture of gags.

Cheers is not an abandoned franchise. A representative from CBS traveled to Madrid to supervise the scripts and rehearsals. Each character needed the approval of its original creators. "I wouldn't say that they are controlling us, but they are very on top of things and if they don't like something they say so and try to change it," explains Martín.

"A remake of a hit comedy from 20 years ago can only work if you do a thorough job of adapting it," notes producer Simon Stern. "That work lets you use the best of the original dialogue and plots, but also create other new ones."

If the scripts have taken almost a year to prepare, choosing the actors has gone on for three months - an unusually long time for a TV series. "You don't move forward without a good cast in this type of comedy series," says director Gómez Pereira. He knows it wasn't easy to find the actors willing to take a risk on an experiment like this, but the pieces of the cast were fitted together one by one, from Joan Pera (a very popular comedian in Catalonia known outside the region as the dubbing "voice of Woody Allen") to Pepón Nieto. "When we had lunch with Alberto San Juan to offer him the role that Ted Danson played in the original, he spent the whole time thinking that his agent had set up a hidden camera," remembers the series' producer.

"It also seemed crazy to me," says Resines. "But the day that I arrived to record a test and I saw the set I was excited by the idea."

San Juan has not accepted a regular role in a TV series in 15 years: "Now I am happy to do television, and not to enjoy having a job, but rather to do this particular job."

Television has stopped being just a mere place to find work. It also offers artistic opportunities that are much more interesting than the limited film projects that do the rounds in an industry affected by various crises: the economy as a whole, the medium in particular and its own esthetic language. In this climate, Gómez Pereira - whose most recent work, in 2008, was El juego del ahorcado - has accepted his first TV series and skillfully adapted to a medium that has its own rules: four cameras (the norm for a sitcom, they explain) that pick up the gestures and movements of each character. "There is a lot of choreography involved," says actress Chiqui Fernández.

It is a chorus dance that requires a baton capable of giving the precise rhythm - "And he is a director with a good ear," says her fellow cast member Luis Bermejo. "Each person brings a different type of humor with them, but we form a compact group," adds Pepón Nieto.

Inside the black box that houses the Madrid set of Cheers, it's easy to block out the lonely industrial zone that surrounds it and the heat that sears just a millimeter beyond its doors. The nostalgia is also diluted, to the benefit of the present. And when the chorused greeting that was the show's trademark ("Norm!") is replaced with its Spanish version ("¡Blas!"), the old Boston family recovers the miraculous life of harebrained ideas.