TVSquad

Welcome to Subtle Subtitles. For those of you who are uninitiated to the purpose of this feature, we're asking you to come up with your funniest quote or description for what's going on in the screen grab we choose for the week. Winners are announced in the following Friday's contest.

Last contest's winner: Dorv

"You know, Dru was a 20th level dungeon master, but I could never get how the bloody game worked..."

This week, I couldn't resist using the image from my Ken Levine and Cheers post ...

One of our writers, Bob Sassone, introduced me to Ken Levine's blog a couple of years ago. Within a couple of weeks I had his RSS feed in my "Must Always Read" category, and there it remains.

If you don't know who Ken Levine is, if you're any sort of fan of television, it's likely you've seen something he's written: His credits include 36 episodes of Cheers, 16 episodes of M*A*S*H, seven episodes of Frasier, seven episodes of Becker, four episodes of Wings, two episodes of The Simpsons ... and a partridge in a pear tree. In short, the man knows how to write; he's won an Emmy for his writing and even sometimes offers a highly-regarded course on comedy writing, called The Sitcom Room.

Levine's blog is filled with stories from his days with the aforementioned shows, and they're sometimes hilarious, always fascinating. As a friend of TV Squad, and to celebrate the all-things Cheers week of Retro Squad, he's taken the time out to share a new story below. Enjoy!

Do not adjust your web browser. You are now entering the Retro Squad, where we are reviewing past episodes of classic TV shows.

Even when it isn't at its greatest (which, for many fans, hasn't been since season 10) The Simpsons has still provided some great parodies of classic movies and television programs. For instance, in the season four episode "Itchy & Scratchy: The Movie" they did a great parody of the Star Trek movie franchise with Star Trek XII: So Very Tired. I still crack up everytime I see the scene where the severely obese Scotty is telling an aged Captain Kirk that he can't push the warp engines any further.

Some of the most memorable characters in television were never actually seen. They were talked about, and their presence, even if it was always offscreen, was often crucial to the plot. I've come up with five awesome (but unseen) TV characters. Here they are:

Vera: From what I recall, Vera, the wife of beer-lover Norm Peterson on Cheers, made only one appearance on the show, and that was just her legs. According to both Wikipedia and IMDb, she was played by George Wendt's real-life wife, Bernadette Birkette.