When I tell people that I have enjoyed a 30-year career writing and producing television comedies, and that one of them was the long-running hit sitcom, Cheers, I know what they are thinking. They are thinking, Boy, I’ll bet that guy is just living large on those residuals.
Residuals, for those of you who are not in show business — though, to be honest, are we not all in show business, when you think about it? — are the per-episode payments a writer, actor, or director receives, pretty much forever, whenever that episode appears somewhere. Residual payments have a tight hold on the imagination of some people, and most of them assume that if you have enough episodes in rotation, you are in fat city.
I know this because many people just come right out and ask. So, how much are we talking? They will demand to know. Like, you probably never have to work again, am I right? And some people are a little more discreet — their eyes flick up and down, taking in my watch, my shoes, and the glow of my complexion, and rapidly adding up the costs of each. Nice shoes, probably in the high six to seven hundreds, plus that watch is vintage, and it’s a Patek, OK, has wrinkles, so probably no Botox, but the neck skin is fairly OK, and the general skin tone says expensive moisturizers, hard to say about residual payments, maybe he just invested smart?
I often have to wait a few seconds for this to die down before the conversation resumes.
This is fine, really. I don’t mind it at all. I understand the human need to know exactly what everyone else has in the bank. But for the record, let me clarify that residual payments start out pretty high, about 90% of the original script fee a writer received, but after a few reruns and a foreign sale or two, the number starts to slide down a very long, slippery slope. Put it this way: In the final quarter of 2025, the residual payments accrued during my entire career were, roughly, zero. The quarter before that, I think they were around $30. And when I opened the envelope and saw the check for that amount, my immediate reaction was, 30 bucks! Sweet! Over the decades, I have been conditioned to expect less.
So again, for the record, if you ever meet me and do the up-and-down scan: I inherited the watch.
None of this, I hope, comes off as ingratitude. When I was working full-time in television, during the go-go 1990s and early 2000s, I fully admit that my compensation package was what economists might call irrational and unsustainable over-investment. Even as a squinty-eyed free-market libertarian, I can honestly say I am thrilled that some people still want to throw their money away, and when they are throwing it in my direction, the last thing I’m going to do is hand them a copy of Gary Becker’s Human Capital.
All of this is to say, someone on Instagram is posting snippets from each episode of Cheers — he devotes a week’s worth of posts to each episode — and it’s found its way into my algorithm. I’m enjoying scrolling through the high points of my career, a few minutes at a time. What I am not doing, thanks to the loosey-goosey attitude of social media companies toward copyright infringement laws, is getting paid. And that’s fine with me, too. Because the amount I would receive for a fragment of a scene of a 30-year-old episode that appears on an ad-supported social-media platform is considerably smaller than the satisfaction I receive, and the dopamine hit I experience, when I come across a particularly good moment from a show I was involved with. It’s a fun and unexpected jolt of happiness.
Which I think I may have ruined, because last week I reposted a scene I was particularly proud of — short version: Woody is terrified that a visiting French lothario is going to steal his girlfriend — and one of my followers on Instagram, who is also an executive at Paramount Global, which owns the rights to Cheers (at least, as of this writing; you never know), immediately messaged me to say that he’s alerted his colleagues to this infringement and they are going to put a stop to it at once.
You should be getting paid for this, he said, clearly thinking he was doing me a favor. But there are some things worth more than a quarterly residuals payment. As long as that payment is lower than $30.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.