Rebecca Howe

Rebecca Howe is a fictional character on the American television show Cheers, portrayed by Kirstie Alley. She is introduced after Shelley Long, who played overeducated barmaid Diane Chambers, left to pursue a movie career. Much of the show's humor had been based around the interaction and sexual tension between the womanizing, working-class main character, bartender Sam Malone, and the high-class, snobby Diane. Rebecca was intended to fill the gap as Sam's new female foil. The Rebecca era of Cheers is seen by many fans to be wittier and more humorous than the Diane era.

Character overview

Rebecca Howe enters Cheers as the manager assigned by the bar's new corporate owner. Rebecca is eager to please her bosses (see The Gift of the Woodi episode) and move up the corporate ladder, although the atmosphere of the Cheers bar is like purgatory to her. She is initially presented as a tough, no-nonsense corporate type ("this one eats live sharks" Carla comments) but her façade soon drops, revealing her neurotic and clumsy tendencies. Rebecca is fired from the Lillian Corporation at the same time Sam gets the bar back from the corporation. Sam keeps Rebecca on staff as a "hired babe," technically as a waitress, though she is practically never seen waiting tables. She has a cigarette addiction, which caused an enormous fire, which resulted in Rebecca using her life savings to repair Cheers. She later plans to buy back the bar for herself, after John Allen Hill, their upstairs neighbor, becomes the new owner of Melville's Fine Sea Food. Mr. Hill also becomes a rival of Sam Malone, and he obtains half of Cheers, forcing Sam to pay rent in addition to using Cheers as the waiting lounge of Melville's. Rebecca receives an allowance from her father and helps Sam buy back half of Cheers, resulting in their co-owning the bar. She also becomes the super of her apartment complex. She has had many ideas on how to improve Cheers. She has a tea room, where she serves chili. The chili provides success to her tea room, but Sam misuses the chili cooker, resulting in a huge explosion and a gigantic hole in the wall. She responds by smashing the windows of Sam's Corvette. She has a sister Susan, a movie actress. When Susan comes to visit, Sam tries playing each of the women against the other, for his own advantage--until Rebecca and Susan compare notes. They stage a confrontation in the bar's office, in which Rebecca takes a pistol and shoots her sister six times, sending Sam into a state of shock. He gets his comeuppance when the "deceased" Susan, whom he has dragged out into the main bar area, says "I'm dead!" and Carla, Woody, Frasier, Lilith, Cliff, and Norm stand up inside the bar area to witness Sam's humiliation. Rebecca constantly throws herself at the feet of rich men, first Evan Drake and then Robin Colcord, but she eventually sleeps with Sam when the two of them decide to conceive a child together. In the penultimate episode, Rebecca meets a plumber named Don (played by Tom Berenger), whom she marries in the series' finale. Later, when Sam visits Frasier, in an episode of the Cheers spinoff Frasier, he tells him that Don left Rebecca after making a fortune on a plumbing-related invention, and that Rebecca was "back at the bar." When Frasier asks if that meant she was waiting tables again, Sam replies, "No, she's just back at the bar."

Side note: this is also the name of a psychologist who cannot publish under her birth name because of copy right infringement if she does.