Thoughts on Frasier

I recently watched the entire eleven season run of Frasier. In brief, it is, without question, one of the best written sitcoms out there. Current, past, all time. It’s smart, funny, works on multiple levels. A few thoughts about many, many, many episodes of television:

The pilot episode is simply excellent. It does what a good pilot should do, which is to be funny, be dramatic, set up an effective scenario about how the action will play out, where the characters are going, and what it all means. Of course it’s also clear that in this episode and in the next few, the writers and actors are still figuring out what they’re doing. Case in point, Niles and Daphne don’t meet for a few episodes. And when they do, it’s clear why they became so central to the series. 

The first season finale, My Coffee with Niles, essentially takes places in real time as the two brothers – when not being interrupted – are having coffee together. It is on rewatching, perhaps an even more impressive accomplishment. There are laugh lines and comedic bits where the characters are performing, but the humor and the really thoughtful moments flow organically in a way that speaking as a writer, one aspires to. It doesn’t usually work, but even after a season of being impressed with the show, it was excellent.

So many aspects of the show stand out, but the title cards in between scenes were an especially inventive trick. I’m sure there were plenty of episodes where it became annoying as hell to write them, but when they were good, they were laugh out loud funny.

In the first season I’m struck by the talent and inventiveness of two writing teams, who are too rarely mentioned when discussed what made the series great – Anne Flett-Giordano & Chuck Ranberg, and Denise Moss & Sy Dukane. (Or maybe they were talked about back when the show came out. I was young enough that I would have had no awareness of any of that)

They’re credited with writing 11 of the 24 episodes of the first season. They also wrote some of the seasons best episodes and some of the key moments in the season – and the series. Including Niles and Daphne’s first meeting, the introduction of Bob “Bulldog” Briscoe, and the first episode about the annual Seattle Broadcasting Awards (the SeaBees). But also episodes like The Crucible, Oops!, A Mid-Winter Night’s Dream, and Fortysomething were funny and really built a cast of characters that could last for more than a decade.

Also, special note to Frasier Crane’s Day Off by Ranberg and Flett-Giordano, which is the funniest episode of the season. They also wrote An Affair to Forget, which was arguably the funniest episode of season two. (And one of the great David Hyde Pierce performances to boot).

They all went on to have careers writing for other shows, but as with a lot of television writers, but I don’t think any had the careers or the success that they should have. Though I do feel that way about a lot of writers tbf.

I did enjoy Flett-Giordano’s novel Marry, Kiss, Kill which is a fun fabulous murder mystery with a lot of humor. I’m waiting for a sequel, Anne!

David Lloyd wrote some very funny episodes of the show. Lloyd is of course famous for his legendary comedy writing career, which includes a long stint as a major monologue writer for Johnny Carson, working on Cheers and Taxi and the Mary Tyler Moore Show, and writing the famous episode of Mary Tyler Moore, “Chuckles Bites the Dust.” Structure is so important is farce and comedy, and many of his episodes here were just lacking, even if he did also manage to craft some of the show’s best. I feel I could say the same about Cheers, where he wrote some truly great episodes for them, but he was never the voice of the show. 

I would give almost anything to be able to write episodes like The Innkeepers, Ham Radio, Beware of Greeks, Party Party, Taps at the Montana, They’re Playing Our Song. All of which ranged from very good to some of the very best. That’s the thing about Lloyd, not every episode he wrote worked, but he was funny. 

Joe Keenan joined the show in the second season and his episode The Matchmaker is brilliant on so many levels. And holds up a quarter century later. As Frasier invites the new station manager to his apartment for dinner. The station manager thinks it’s a date, Frasier thinks the station manager is straight and wants to set him up with Daphne, and the manager thinks Frasier is gay and is asking him out. It’s just brilliant farce. Agents in America, Part III was another great episode from Keenan. (I mean the title alone). A Word to the Wiseguy. The Two Mrs. Cranes. The Zoo Story. The Seal Who Came to Dinner. The Ski Lodge. There’s a reason he became one of the showrunners by the end. 

(Also, watching the fourth season episode “Roz’s Turn,” I felt like I was watching the conception of multiple podcast hosts and columnists. But that’s a whole other story…)

At the end of the fifth season, the writers decided to shake things up. The radio station changed format and everyone who worked there was laid off. Watching it, I was struck by how many of the elements that I associated with Frasier weren’t introduced yet. Kenny made his first appearance in that season finale. Daphne’s family hadn’t made an appearance. Niles was still married. The show was less than half over, had covered a lot of ground, but I felt like I do with most sitcoms where I can’t help but think, how did they get X more years out of this? 

Honestly, the answer is, the quality drops off. Still, it’s a pretty good sitcom, but it’s not what it used to be. Though there were a lot of very good episodes to come, every now and then I would think, this show would be so much better with half the episodes.

At the end of the Season 7, Niles and Daphne are together. There’s also a sense of, well, what now? It is funny to think that there were four more seasons after that. Again, it’s not that there was nothing good in this series after that, but there was a fundamental change in how the show operated. The creators tried to do various things to craft a new way for the show to work. They tried to make Daphne more one of the family and her interactions with Frasier changed and took on a different tone. She was shown to have more of a relationship with Roz, which honestly I think they should have done more with earlier.

Season 8 leaned heavily into drama. That was also when actor Jane Leeves got pregnant but the show had to go on, and having a baby wouldn’t fit for the show, so she got fat and went away for a few episodes. And I’m assuming there was a break of a couple months while she was gone as well to help. But it was still strange.

In retrospect watching it, all I could think about was how she looked pregnant, was gone for a few episodes, and then returned, possibly thinner than she had been beforehand. She had a baby and must have immediately gone on a crash diet and exercise plan. There’s something so brutal about that.

The running joke for a few episodes was that Niles didn’t notice she was gaining weight even while everyone else did. And when she returned, there was one of the show’s most dramatic episodes as he tries to come to terms with his vision of her and how much it was based on reality. And as someone who has had an unrequited crush on someone (okay, I’m describing everyone) it was really affecting.

Frasier had his own moment in an episode that didn’t quite work. In it, Frasier is receiving a Lifetime Achievement award at this year’s awards, and he visits his old mentor from Harvard who’s in town, played by the late great Rene Auberjonois, who psychoanalyzes Frasier and forces him to pause and see himself differently. If the episode as a whole was lacking, that scene between the two and that moment of fear on Frasier’s face was one of the most powerful in the show.

Overall, I don’t think the show gets enough credit for the relationship between Frasier and Lilith. Bebe Neuwirth’s Lilith was one of the great comedic characters of Cheers, and in Frasier she becomes somewhat different of a character – similarly to how Frasier becomes a different character. Here she shows up once a season, usually because she travels to Seattle or Frasier goes to Boston. There are a lot of jokes about his ex by Frasier and the other characters, but they’re also softened when she does show up because she is cold and intense but she’s also vulnerable and struggling with work and relationships. The two wouldn’t communicate if it weren’t for their son, but they still have feelings for each other and they’re both aware enough to realize that – and that while they will always love each other, they also can’t stand the other a lot of the time. Maybe most of the time.

It truly was one of the great portraits of divorce and what it means.

In the last season of the show, Joe Keenan and Christopher Lloyd, who had been so key to earlier seasons return to the show and I won’t say that the last season is great, but it is an improvement. The fact that they were writing towards something helped, I think. 

One key was the addition of Ronnee Lawrence played by Wendie Malick. The old babysitter of the Cranes, she dates and in the final episode of the show marries Martin. It might be easy to say that she is a character more like Roz or Martin, but Malick has her own style, her own timing, her own delivery, which is distinct from everyone else in the cast. There are multiple occasions where it’s clear why Martin would be interested in her, why lots of people would. She brings to the show a different energy.

And similar to much of the cast, John Mahoney especially, Malick is able to shift so nimbly from comedy to drama, from being loud and performative to tentative and vulnerable and demonstrating how she’s trying to be open, lowering her guard ever so slightly. The episode where the two end up getting engaged – the scene where they get engaged, really – is so quiet and unexpected and plays to the way that the two actors are able to slow down and deliver this moment of openness – just barely – long enough for him to ask and for her to accept. Which seems as much a surprise to them as to the audience. 

Moments like that are what bring to mind the earlier seasons. Just these perfect scenes that make us laugh and then hit us with something even deeper, reminding us that the laughter means something.

My favorite moment with Malick though has to be in “Miss Right Now” which guest starred Jennifer Tilly and Laura Linney. As she’s about to walk out the front door Malick declares to Frasier, “You may get away with this now. But when I’m your mother!”

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In the end, I keep thinking about how Frasier is about middle age. It’s a show about getting older and life in one’s forties. About being a parent and being a son. About feeling alone and unfulfilled. About how work can be going well, about how one can be successful, but it’s not enough. 

In some ways it feels like an extension of Cheers, where – at least initially – it was about Sam and Diane, who were two very different people but had reached their thirties, felt like failures in a lot of ways, and were trying to figure out what comes next. In other ways, it feels like a rejection of Cheers. Consider that final episode of Cheers, where Sam and Diane consider getting back together and Sam is going to sell Cheers and berates his friends in the bar. But in the end, Sam returns and in that final scene, much of the cast sits around smoking cigars and drinking and talking about life. Woody says that they are dear to him as his own family, mores even. It is what we all seek in friendship in our community in our found family.

In that scene we see Frasier struggling to say that he cares about the rest of them, and is ultimately unable to do so. In the spinoff we see him deal with his father – who has an even harder time saying such a thing, even to his sons – and his brother, who is unable to say it, in a similar but different way.

In that episode with the late great Rene Auberjoinois (who has had dozens of great roles, but he’ll always be Odo to me), Frasier gets taken apart, made to see that he has constructed his life around work, and he doesn’t know what he would be without it, and he’s terrified there is nothing else, because his career has given him distance from people. Without that distance, he’s lost.

The final episode of Frasier involves him giving up his community, but it also sees him abandon his career, for someone he can be open with and say I love you to. There is a way in which the final episodes in which Laura Linney guest stars seem to dissipate, as she leaves Seattle for Chicago. It ends with him arriving in Chicago. So we never see her. Never see what happens next. Which in some ways is unsatisfying. But I don’t think it requires a romantic reading to see a following scene as superfluous. It doesn’t need to end with them meeting at the airport and walking away together. He realized what she means, he understands what he really wants and what he really needs, and he won’t let anything stand in his way. 

In one of the final scenes of the show, Frasier quotes from Alfred Lloyd Tennyson’s  great poem Ulysses:

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: 

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, 

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. 

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' 

We are not now that strength which in old days 

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; 

One equal temper of heroic hearts, 

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will 

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Those final two lines have become cliched in many ways, but they also sum up so much of what it means to get older. That understanding of what we must do and be. To accept that we are older, to understand it, but to push forward anyway: “that which we are, we are”. Because nothing is finished, nothing is set in stone. Life is serious and absurd in equal doses. Years and challenges lay ahead of us. If we will only meet them.