Heritage Auctions Now Has Items from Cheers, Jeopardy! and All in the Family

Television has an interesting ability to take large sets on a studio and shrink them down to make us believe we’re watching the lives of people inside a one-bedroom apartment or a quaint home.

Folks in the 1980s who watched NBC’s Cheers to follow the on-again/off-again romance between Sam Malone and Diane Chambers also felt like taking a trip to their favorite bar at the end of a hard day.

Back in the ’70s, families sat down to visit the Bunkers’ home at 704 Hauser St., Queens, on All in the Family and watch Archie Bunker and his son-in-law Michael Stivic, aka Meathead, battle over tough issues like race, politics, gender and equality. The living room, complete with Archie’s special chair, one of which sits in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., felt like it could fit in any family household.

There’s a different feeling when you see these sets and props up close. It’s not just that they are bigger than the images you’re used to seeing on a TV set – or these days, from a laptop or a smartphone. These are things you grew up with, even if you never physically visited Johnny Carson on his Tonight Show set or accidentally sat on Norm’s stool at Cheers. Your eyes are seeing them for the first time without the glowing filter of an electronic screen, and they can still deliver the same emotional punch they did when you saw the stories that unfolded around them for the first time.

These and hundreds of other pieces of television history are part of a comprehensive gathering in Dallas called The Comisar Collection, named after collector James Comisar, who has amassed costumes and set pieces that cover decades of television history. Comisar has transferred his collection to the warehouse and archives of Heritage Auctions for a special auction starting on June 2 that’s bound to become one of the biggest and most competitive TV memorabilia auctions in recent memory.

“When I started this collecting journey, there was no Google, eBay, an Internet or even digital cameras,” Comisar wrote in the introduction to The Comisar Collection’s catalog. “I ran classified ads in newspapers and I scoured estate sales with whatever cash I could advance from my one credit card. I eventually filled up my closets, the garage, then 10 storage units.”

Heritage Auctions started organizing and cataloging Comisar’s massive collection of TV costumes, props, photos and set pieces nine months ago. The collection is so massive and covers so many eras and iconic shows from Gunsmoke to Breaking Bad that the auction company produced a 400-page catalog.

“That was a labor of love,” says Heritage Auctions chief strategy officer and general counsel Joshua Benesh. “Those descriptions and the stories, that’s more than an auction catalog. I think it’s sort of a coffee table book celebrating TV history.”

Comisar has spent years collecting, curating and preserving these pieces of television history. The collection is so large, you’re bound to recognize something, even if you’re the kind of person who just keeps a TV on in the background. It runs the entire gamut of television, and it’s not just props from scripted shows. Some of the more impressive game-show collectibles include two of the wooden contestant podiums used on the iconic quiz show Jeopardy! and the colorful Plinko sign from the long-running daytime game show The Price Is Right – the one that would flip over to reveal to players standing next to host Bob Barker that they could win as much as $50,000.

“He had originally been collecting for more than 30 years, and he took a very curated approach to collecting and sought out to buy and sort the best and most iconic from across TV’s broad history with the idea that appropriate for the public,” Benesh says, “either in a museum or as an element to an existing museum.”

When the team finished cataloging the items, they were displayed in a special showing at the New York Gallery in New York before making their way to Heritage’s Dallas warehouse. 

“We reconstructed the Cheers bar and the All in the Family set and The Tonight Show set here in Dallas,” Benesh says. “We put a lot of the ironic props and costumes from the James Comisar collection on display and opened that to the public to allow people to walk through and appreciate and see those things in person.”

The auction will be open to private collectors and philanthropists who plan to put items on public display in museums or other open spaces. Civilians may also participate, but should remember these items are bound to get pricey – not that we’re calling you poor, we just know how much your rent is.

“I am now focused on getting these treasures into the hands of the fans who always valued them, private curators with the means to conserve them and institutions dedicated to the study of social history,” Comisar writes.

Benesh says Heritage Auctions is eager to fulfill Comisar’s and all TV viewers’ hopes and dreams for these shows and its histories.

“It’s one of those rare collections that’s just so tied in American culture and consciousness that it’s sort of hard to pass up when these things are available and when there’s only one or two of them in existence,” Benesh says.