{"id":237375,"date":"2026-01-10T06:19:06","date_gmt":"2026-01-10T06:19:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/237375\/"},"modified":"2026-01-10T06:19:06","modified_gmt":"2026-01-10T06:19:06","slug":"r-i-p-tom-cherones-seinfeld-and-newsradio-director","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/237375\/","title":{"rendered":"R.I.P. Tom Cherones, Seinfeld and NewsRadio director"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tom Cherones has died. As producer and director of 81 of the first 86 episodes of Seinfeld, Cherones\u2019 TV work has been heralded as some of the most successful TV comedy of all time. (Notably \u201cThe Chinese Restaurant,\u201d<\/a> \u201cThe Parking Garage,\u201d<\/a> and \u201cThe Contest,\u201d<\/a> frequent entries on lists of the greatest sitcom episodes ever produced.) An author and teacher in addition to his work as a director, Cherones also worked prominently on Ellen DeGeneres\u2019 Ellen and cult classic TV sitcom NewsRadio, directing a significant chunk of its final three seasons. Per THR<\/a>, Cherones\u2019 Jan. 5 death, after a battle with Alzheimer\u2019s Disease, has been confirmed by his family. He was 86.<\/p>\n

Born in Alabama, Cherones got his start in public television in Pittsburgh in the 1970s, working at famed public TV station WQED. (Although mostly employed as a producer, Cherones noted in an interview in 2011 that he once subbed as a director for the channel\u2019s most famous show, Mister Rogers\u2019 Neighborhood.) Moving out to Hollywood in 1975 with his wife, Cherones got early gigs producing on shows like General Hospital\u00a0and variety shows, before breaking into comedy with a job on Welcome Back, Kotter. Building up a steady reputation as a reliable producer and director across the 1980s (with credits including Growing Pains and Pam Dawber\u2019s My Sister Sam), Cherones had just learned, circa 1989, that one of his own pilots wasn\u2019t getting picked up by its network\u2014only to hear that a rival project, The Seinfeld Chronicles, had just gotten the green light at NBC, and was in need of a producer and director.<\/p>\n

Cherones came on to Seinfeld in both capacities, helming almost every episode of its first five seasons, ensuring its frequently rushed production moved smoothly, and establishing much of the visual language of the show. (In interviews, he noted a disinterest in making the series resemble the oppressively lit multi-cam sitcoms he\u2019d spent the last decade making, striving to give the show the feel of a single-camera show while still working within what were technically more traditional limits.) Effusive in his praise of the show\u2019s writing\u2014saying, at the end of the day, that the show\u2019s comedy was\u00a0\u201cLarry David\u201d\u2014Cherones was often tasked with keeping the series flowing smoothly amidst chaos, network pushback, and frequent delays in the writing process. Which didn\u2019t stop him from occasionally joining in with the show\u2019s sense of iconoclasm, either, noting that he helped push back when NBC expressed confusion at episodes like \u201cThe Chinese Restaurant,\u201d saying, \u201cThey asked me, \u2018Couldn\u2019t you make it look more like a sitcom?\u2019 And no, I wasn\u2019t going to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cherones left\u00a0Seinfeld\u00a0in 1994, after the conclusion of its fifth season, and apparently at Seinfeld\u2019s request. (\u201cHe was tired of the same thing, I guess,\u201d he told interviewers two decades later.<\/a>) If there were hard feelings about the departure, they didn\u2019t stop Cherones from joining many of the show\u2019s staffers for a cameo in its 1998 finale, although he personally considered the episode too \u201cdepressing.\u201d A tireless worker, Cherones moved from Seinfeld\u00a0to\u00a0Ellen, where he directed the show\u2019s second season, and then from there (after a brief stint on\u00a0Caroline In The City) to NewsRadio, where he directed the vast majority of its third, fourth, and fifth seasons. Besides navigating the horror of cast member Phil Hartman\u2019s murder in 1998\u2014directing both Hartman\u2019s final episode, and the show\u2019s funny, touching tribute to the late star at the start of its final season\u2014Cherones also directed many of the show\u2019s more bizarre and experimental episodes, including alternate universe episodes that took place in space or on the Titanic. (He also directed \u201cComplaint Box,\u201d<\/a> which includes one of the all-time funniest ensemble scenes in TV history<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

After\u00a0NewsRadio\u00a0ended, Cherones\u2019 career slowed down considerably; his later filmography is mostly filled with single-episode stints on shows like Sabrina The Teenage Witch,\u00a0Desperate Housewives, and\u00a0Reaper. In that time, though, he also devoted himself to opportunities for mentorship and education, running an annual program at the University Of Alabama in his hometown of Tuscaloosa, teaching film students about the practical craft of directing film and television. (He noted, with pride, that graduates of the program had begun forming a small cadre of Hollywood professionals in the 2010s, creating a support structure that embodied an idea that he tried to impart to students, that \u201ca kid from Tuscaloosa can do okay in this business.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Tom Cherones\u2019 career, then, is a testament to the idea that great TV does not just happen; that it does not pass, like magic, from the minds of writers into the mouths of actors, who then spin genius out of nothing. Cherones would have been the first guy to admit that his was not the spark of inspiration powering Seinfeld\u2019s ascent to the generation-gripping zeitgeist\u2014for all that he helped craft the show\u2019s sitcom tradition-defying look. As both a producer, and a director, his brilliance was in the ability to translate the ideas of others into the world; to take a funny-in-the-room idea like \u201cWe\u2019re going to film our whole episode inside a parking garage\u201d and then address the million complexities that grow out of it, producing a half hour of workable, classic television in the process. Great scripts can happen without guys like Cherones; great performances can exist without their hard-working ilk. But great television is impossible without that kind of day-in, day-out commitment to quality, and the number of all-time classics on the man\u2019s resum\u00e9 is solid proof of the impact it can make.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tom Cherones has died. As producer and director of 81 of the first 86 episodes of Seinfeld, Cherones\u2019…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":237376,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[93,61,60,282],"class_list":{"0":"post-237375","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=237375"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237375\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/237376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}