Woody Boyd from Hanover, Indiana was designed to be the character that Coach had been: the innocent at the bar, the person whose lack of sophistication was the source of comedy and whose basic decency was the source of warmth. The name was a deliberate nod to the actor — Woody, from Hanover, Indiana — and the character’s specific quality was designed to fit the person who was playing him. This is the kind of good casting: when the actor’s actual qualities are channeled into the character’s qualities rather than suppressed or overridden by them.
He stayed for eight seasons, through the show’s end in 1993. In those eight years, Cheers became one of the most successful television programs in American history — a show about a bar in Boston populated by regulars and staff, organized around relationships that deepened over years and around comedy that ranged from wordplay to physical comedy to the specific observation of human self-delusion that the show consistently delivered at a high level. The ensemble — Ted Danson, Shelley Long, Rhea Perlman, George Wendt, John Ratzenberger, Kelsey Grammer, and later Harrelson and Kirstie Alley — was one of the most effective in television history.
The Emmy nominations — five of them over his eight seasons — reflected what the television industry recognized in his work: that the character of Woody Boyd was being played with genuine craft rather than with the mechanical repetition that long-running television often produces. Each season the character developed in ways that felt organic rather than contrived, and the specific quality that made Harrelson right for the role — the capacity to play genuine rather than performed goodness — sustained itself across years of weekly episodes.