Touchstone Plus-Or-Minus: Hello Again

When Shelley Long left Cheers at the end of the sitcom’s fifth season to pursue her movie career and spend more time with her family, a lot of people felt she was making a mistake (about the movie part, nobody was begrudging her wanting to raise her daughter). After a rocky first couple of years where the show struggled to find an audience, Cheers was finally hitting its stride. With its ratings continuing to increase, the rest of the cast renewed their contracts. But Long tasted box office success with the comedies The Money Pit and Outrageous Fortune and won a Golden Globe nomination for Irreconcilable Differences. The big screen was calling.

Clearly, Disney agreed that she ought to be in pictures. Like her Outrageous Fortune costar, Bette Midler, the studio signed her to a multi-picture deal. Hello Again, Long’s second Touchstone movie, was molded to show what the star could do on her own, without a sparring partner like Midler. Instead, it proved the nay-sayers correct and demonstrated that Shelley Long probably should have stuck around Boston a while longer.