Who co-created Cheers with Glen and Les Charles?

James Burrows co-created Cheers with brothers Glen and Les Charles. The three had worked together on Taxi and developed the sitcom around a Boston neighborhood bar where strangers and regulars could escape everyday pressures.

Burrows was the project’s director and helped shape its distinctive ensemble style, while Glen and Les Charles served as writers and producers. Their collaboration gave Cheers its balance of fast comic dialogue, recurring relationships, and long-running character development. The series premiered on NBC in 1982 and ran for 11 seasons.

Burrows directed the vast majority of the show’s episodes, including the pilot and the finale. Glen and Les Charles continued to guide the series creatively and wrote the pilot, “Give Me a Ring Sometime.” A common mix-up is naming one of the show’s later showrunners—such as Ken Estin, Sam Simon, or David Angell—as a co-creator; they were important production figures but were not the credited creators.