Woody bartender on Cheers / MON 7-4-22 / Intense illumination, as in old movie projectors / Woman's name that looks like Roman numerals for 51 + 51 / French fashion monogram

Constructor: Bruce Haight

Relative difficulty: Medium (maybe even mildly tougher than Medium, for a Monday)

THEME: STATUE OF LIBERTY (57A: New York City landmark suggested by the ends of 17-, 22-, 34- and 50-Across)— last words of themers are parts of said statue; I guess this is a 4th of July-themed puzzle (?):

Theme answers:

• PASSING THE TORCH (17A: Handing responsibility to someone else)
• TRIPLE CROWN (22A: Major accomplishment in baseball or horse racing)
• ASPIRIN TABLET (34A: One way to deal with a pain in the neck)
• TOWN AND GOWN (50A: Two interacting communities in the home of a college)

Word of the Day: ARC LIGHT (11D: Intense illumination, as in old movie projectors) —

An arc lamp or arc light is a lamp that produces light by an electric arc (also called a voltaic arc).

The carbon arc light, which consists of an arc between carbon electrodes in air, invented by Humphry Davy in the first decade of the 1800s, was the first practical electric light. It was widely used starting in the 1870s for street and large building lighting until it was superseded by the incandescent light in the early 20th century. It continued in use in more specialized applications where a high intensity point light source was needed, such as searchlights and movie projectors until after World War II. The carbon arc lamp is now obsolete for most of these purposes, but it is still used as a source of high intensity ultraviolet light.

The term is now used for gas discharge lamps, which produce light by an arc between metal electrodes through a gas in a glass bulb. The common fluorescent lamp is a low-pressure mercury arc lamp. The xenon arc lamp, which produces a high intensity white light, is now used in many of the applications which formerly used the carbon arc, such as movie projectors and searchlights. (wikipedia)

Cringed my way through most of this. The fill just creaked and groaned. Started with old initialism at 1A (YSL) and then ARLO SOPS YESIDO EDER COSI SNL TERA ATON and by now I'm halfway down the grid. And what the hell was up with that clue on LILI (23D: Woman's name that looks like Roman numerals 51 + 51). No, 51 + 51 = 102, and unless there is a woman somewhere named CII, then that clue is garbage. I eventually got it—and it helped me change "YES YES" to "YES, I DO"—but if you want consecutive "LI"s and you're super in-love with your little Roman numeral joke, there's gotta be a better way to go about it than this misleading equation-style clue. HIC IMHO ATTAR ATAB ETTU AGEE HIC CEO NOFEE NSYNC LORRIE ALOEGEL, two different "___ AT" phrases, ETC. It's as if very, very little care went into filling and polishing this grid. When you look at the grid construction, you can see that it's really horrendously choppy, with lots of black squares cutting through the middle, creating a surfeit of 3- and 4-letter answers. The result was just painful to wade through. And it's not like the theme itself is any great shakes. Four things associated with a statue. OK. Kind of tepid for (what I imagine is supposed to be) a holiday-themed puzzle. I guarantee you that most every other major daily will produce a Monday puzzle *at least* this strong today. I don't know how the most famous and prestigious puzzle in the country, the one whose editor loves to tout how many submissions he gets, can't manage better than this. Complacency, that's what this is.