That it did not — that the father’s criminal conviction did not become, in 1981 or 1982, the primary public frame through which Woody Harrelson was understood — is partly a product of timing. He was not yet famous. The trial of Charles Harrelson generated national coverage, but it was the kind of coverage that belongs to a criminal case: it was news about Charles, about Judge Wood, about Jimmy Chagra and the drug trafficking world. Woody Harrelson, at that point, was an aspiring actor working as an understudy in a Neil Simon play. The connection between the convicted hitman and the aspiring actor was documented in press coverage of the trial, but it was a footnote rather than a headline. The biography that would have made the connection into a full story — the son who became famous, the father who became notorious — required the son’s fame. That fame was three years away.
## The Specific Luck of Cheers
In 1985, the fourth season of Cheers needed a new cast member. The show had been running since 1982 and had, after a rocky first season in terms of ratings, become one of NBC’s most important properties. The death of Nicholas Colasanto, who played Coach Pantusso, created an opening in the ensemble that the writers needed to fill without disrupting the chemistry that had made the show work.
The casting of Woody Harrelson as Woody Boyd was, in retrospect, one of the more consequential casting decisions in American television of the 1980s. This is easy to say in retrospect; it was a judgment call in 1985, based on auditions and the intuitions of the people responsible for the show. What they found in Harrelson was a performer who could inhabit a specific quality — an unself-conscious goodness, a naivety that was not stupidity but was rather the specific kind of directness that comes from not having learned yet to be strategic — that the character required and that could not be faked.