New Delhi, May 22 -- If television is built on regular people - not to mention people who tune in regularly - then Norm Peterson was the most regular of all. For eleven seasons, he walked into the bar at Cheers with such clockwork regularity that his every entrance elicited a resounding and welcoming "Norm!", a salute not only to a beloved character, but to constancy itself. On a show filled with sharp-tongued banter and characters in constant romantic or existential turmoil, Norm offered something rare and essential: stability.

He arrived in the frame not like a man entering a room, but like a law of nature asserting itself. A sitcom's centre of gravity doesn't always sit at the heart of the plot. Norm rarely drove storylines, but his p...