What Are The Chances…George Wendt Dies On Same Day Cheers Ended 32 Years Before?

I know I wasn’t going to inflict upon you more What Are The Chances…? videos, but this was so topical, and fit in so well with the Class, that I hope you will forgive me.

Turns out the actor George Wendt died exactly 1700 years after, to the very day, as the First Council of Nicaea opened in the year of Our Lord 325.

What are the chances of that?

The strangeness doesn’t stop there. Take a look at this headline: “George Wendt died exactly 32 years after the Cheers finale as fans point out ‘emotional coincidence’” The sitcom in which he performed ended 20 May 1993, and he died 20 May 2025. What are the chances of that?

Now it’s easy to calculate, knowing nothing else, a probability a man will die on any date. It’s 1/365. Or, if you’re feeling pedantic, 1/365.2425, to account for leap years and leap centuries. That’s the answer, then. But that answer doesn’t really address the coincidental nature of his death.

So maybe we want to know the chance any actor dies on the same day as his (or her) series or work ended. The actors’ union SAG-AFTRA says there about 160,000 performers of one kind or another on the books. Likely the bulk of these performers will have appeared in more than one “vehicle”, but suppose we take only their best known. Then supposing we know nothing about those end dates, except that they must be a date on the calendar, we can calculate the probability no actors die on a End Performance Date, or just one will, or just two will, all the way up to however many actors we’re considering; here, 160,000. That’s this picture.

There is a probability of 0.9999…999—190 9s after the decimal!—that at least one of this group of actors dies on his or her End Performance Date. The chance that none of the group dies on their EPD is about 10^-480,000. Which is a very, very small number. There’s roughly a 90% chance that between 404 and 472 of these 160,000 actors will die on their EPD, with the most likely number being 438.

If we do the same for the next 100 actors, and not all 160,000, then we get a 76% chance none dies on his EPD, which is also the most likely outcome. There’s a 23% either 1 or 2 would. With every other possibility after that being pretty unlikely.

We went from none being next to impossible to none being the most likely thing! That’s what increasing the number of chances does for you. None recedes in the rearview mirror fast as we increase the number, even for initially unlikely events.

Still, these calculations don’t capture the full flavor of the coincidence, which still seems remarkable. There’s two ways to look at it.

We started with the first. Wokepedia has an entry, if you can believe it, for every day of the year, listing what its authors consider important events. We began with its top entry, the opening of the First Council of Nicaea, no small thing. But there are many others, such as the first day Shakespeare’s sonnets were published in 1609. Or the day in 1861 North Carolina tried to escape the Union. Or the day in 1989 China declared Martial law for no reason after nothing whatsoever happened in Tiananmen Square.

A lot of other famous people died on 20 May. Like Pope John XXI in 1277, Osman II, the Ottoman sultan, in 1622, and Jon Pertwee, a fellow actor (Dr Who) in 1996. Many other famous persons were born on the date. Like William Congreve in 1772 and John Stuart Mill in 1806. Interestingly, there was nobody listed for 1948, born or died, the year Wendt was born.

Thus the probability that Wendt, or anybody, dies on an “important” or notable date seems close to 1, given that every day has a lot going for it.

Consider next the fluidity of the coincidence. Suppose Wendt died on the 21st. Would we have seen headlines announcing he died “just one day after his final series ended”? Could be. There is always a story that can be woven, no matter how seemingly disparate events are. Six degrees of Kevin Bacon and all that.

Even so, once again, it still doesn’t capture the full feeling about coincidences like this. Which is why above I emphasized words like “knowing nothing else” except dates. All probability is conditional on the evidence we assume: change the assumptions, change the probability.

Which brings us to our second and last way to look at it. Many say people die more often close to their birthdays than at other days. Perhaps. The evidence is far from clear. Analyses have been done, but it all has frightening words like this “After correcting for confounding factors such as seasonality…” (from that same link). Whenever you see that, you’re no longer looking at data but models.

Perhaps most don’t think about their birthdays as they are about to meet their ends, but surely some do. Besides, it’s not just birthdays that are of interest, but days that are considered special. While there’s plenty of data on people’s birth and death days, there’s no data for special days beyond anecdotes like today’s. Which makes verification tough. And then, considering our anecdote, the date may have been special to you if you were a fan of Cheers, but it might not have been so special to Wendt. Maybe he prized the first airing date instead. Who knows?

We do have other evidence, though, and some I’m witness to. People don’t show up to emergency rooms as often on Big Days like Christmas. This is especially remarkable because disease and deaths peak (in the Northern Hemisphere) right around this time: people are sickest then. Yet, because of things like empty rooms on Christmas, it’s obvious the ravages of illness can be forestalled by will. It is not strange to extend this to dying days.

In the end, as with many coincidences, we are left with uncertainty, and with no way of removing it. But people will. They want to move from the uncertainty to a decision so badly that they will either insist Wendt died on purpose that day, or will insist he didn’t. When the proper answer is, given all the evidence we have is, maybe he did, and maybe he didn’t.

VIDEO

https://youtu.be/CFOQgNUh5LM

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