The front door is in Boston and nothing else is. They filmed the outside of a real pub on Beacon Hill and built the rest of it on a stage in California, down a short flight of steps, so the audience up in the bleachers has to look down into the room the way you look into somebody's basement. A man with a headset counts it in. A warm-up comic works the raked seats for a while, tells a few hundred strangers what they're about to watch and, more usefully, when it's funny, because a laugh on tape is a cue like any other and cues get given.

Cut to the thing itself. A woman comes in with a man, the man leaves, and she stays and argues with the bartender for most of half an hour. That's the pilot, 1982, and it's a two-hander with a bar between the two hands — the others in the room feed lines in from the edges the way a good supporting cast does, and then step back out of the light. Staged like a play, shot like a play, which is why it plays.

Then almost nobody watched. Near the bottom of everything broadcast that first season, and NBC left it running anyway, and it ran eleven years and finished in 1993. I've run a Tuesday night to eleven people, four of them sheltering from rain, and wound the second reel on regardless because the house was open and the film was there. Somebody at that network had the same flat, stubborn idea.