Hacker Cinema
Park Street Under
1979 · TV series · 22 min episodes · 1 season
Park Street Under is a sitcom set in a fictional bar in the Park Street subway station in Boston, Massachusetts. It was produced starting in 1979 by Boston television station WCVB-TV. This was a rare example in the United States of a half-hour sitcom produced by a local station during the 1970s. Park Street Under was an inspiration for the NBC sitcom Cheers, which was also set in a fictional Boston bar. The cast included James Spruill, father of filmmaker Robert Patton-Spruill. The scripts were by Jonathan Stathakis and Stu Taylor. Park Street Under is also the original name for the Red Line subway platform at Park Street, which is literally under the streetcar lines that became the Green Line.
1 neutralfrom 1 commenter
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
1 comment on Hacker News
> If you didn’t, but saw the pilot of Park Street Under, you didn’t miss much. They were teeth-gnashingly similar.
This is the head writer of Park Street Under. He's writing an article about the extent to which Cheers copied his show.
He quotes zero lines between the two shows that are similar.
There's another article that goes into more detail:
https://www.bostonmagazine.com/arts-entertainment/2018/03/20/cheers-conspiracy-park-st-under/
From that one it seems clear that the similarity is the choice of character roles and the setting, and not at all in the lines of the scripts for the pilot or any of the other episodes.
It stinks that they lifted those things. But that's not what I had assumed when I read the word "plagiarized" in OP's comment.
(To the head writer's credit, he never used that word.)
Edit: clarification