I watched no series TV between "Twin Peaks" in 1990 and "Andy Richter Controls the Universe" in 2002. So I was delighted, when finding "Frasier" in reruns in the 2010s, to see it wasn't half bad.
I was afraid at first I'd have to be conversant with "Cheers," which I've never watched to this day. But living through the 1980s left me with enough knowledge to get by. So when Lillith, Frasier's ex-wife, shows up I understand her, having heard friends in the 1980s discussing "Cheers."
As a boy in the 1960s I grew up watching comedy shows set on POW camps and western forts and desert islands; comedies featuring genii and witches and talking horses. Fish out of water stories about hillbilly families striking it rich and moving to swanky neighborhoods; fish out of water stories where swanky city slickers move to bizarre country towns . . . In fact, I grew up watching TV comedies that showed imagination. Shows where people drove cars and trucks and tractors. Where they managed funny situations and funny lines without an obsession with sex.
People complained about canned laughter but I found it less annoying than live audiences forcing laughter on cue by signals and signs at what might have been a twelfth take. I got quickly tired of comedies run like stage plays where characters have entrances and exits rather than filmed comedies cut like movies. And though only a teen in the 1970s I got sick of the same-ness. Shows about families, some that got along, some that didn't. Some that had lots of kids, some with even more kids. And all the episodes of all the shows pausing just after the 2/3s mark to demonstrate a moral that never had anything new to say. The only show I watched regularly in the 1980s was "Newhart," a "Green Acres" retread but which, stagey though it was, was at least funny--a quality comedy writers had been abandoning for years in favor of high- and ham-handed social commentary.
"Frasier" was as stagebound and moralistic as any comedy show broadcast since the comedic imagination of the 1960s pooped out. And like the worst of the shows since then, it was just as obsessed with sex (well, Frasier Crane was a Freudian psychologist). And sex is titillating as the lowest common denominator for audiences and provides lots of easy laughs for lazy and unimaginative comedy writers.
What's funny about "Frasier" is, first, the characters. Frasier Crane is a psychologist on the radio (sometimes wonderfully, sometimes overactingly, portrayed by Kelsey Grammer). His brother, Niles, is a psychologist of a different branch of the discipline who has a weird (never seen) wife. Their father, a crippled ex-cop, hates their hoity-toity ways. The father's strange dog and his live-in physiotherapist, who has "psychic" episodes, add to the humor.
Frasier and Niles are like real siblings: similar but different; in constant rivalry, but closing shoulders and standing together when outsiders, or their father, threaten one or both. My late brother and I had a similar relationship.
Funniest of all are the sometimes insane things their father tells about Frasier and Niles in boyhood (for instance, seeing then gad about with derby hats and umbrellas after they started watching "The Avengers"); hearing the nutty things about Niles' off-stage wife; or hearing more of Frasier's or Niles' unnatural tastes. Neither is the sort of person normal people would love hanging with in real life--we've met too many who think their tastes are superior. Who sling around, say, opera terms. Or who claim superiority in wine or musical or artistic knowledge. Who needs them? But both Frasier and Niles make such types laughable, yet endearing.
And what other show can claim hosting legendary stage and screen actor Derek Jacobi as a notably bad actor?
Nevertheless. . . It might not have been so obvious when "Frasier" was first on, but watching it daily I noticed too many episodes where Frasier meets a girl who might have committed to him. Then he agonizes over some penny-ante problem in her or in their relationship and plunges headlong into making a speech about it, running her off. What a nincompoop.
Apart from that recurring nightmare, the episodes are usually written well to a high standard (apart from the constant, annoying misuse of "me" for "I") with enough bizarre twists in some episodes and even more bizarre mentions if something off-stage, to make them funny. Enough. Not as funny as "Andy Richter Controls the Universe," but that show sank like a stone while "Frasier," with a familiar character from "Cheers" and appealing to a lower common denominator, stayed afloat through the 1990s.
It's worth a peek; but since the humor is nearly all verbal (with, yes, notable exceptions) it can be followed just as well while you're doing other things and not keeping your eyes on it all the time. An especial irritation of mine since the 1970s: television is a visual medium but most comedies tell you what's going on and have little action and lots of talk. It's like visible radio. Whereas shows like "Green Acres," with lots of slapstick, demanded watching. And so did a notorious comedy featuring Barbara Eden, for different reasons. Apart from the silent-movie "tags" at the end of each episode, most of "Frasier" can be listened to from the next room with little loss.
Where is the American "Mr. Bean"?
I was afraid at first I'd have to be conversant with "Cheers," which I've never watched to this day. But living through the 1980s left me with enough knowledge to get by. So when Lillith, Frasier's ex-wife, shows up I understand her, having heard friends in the 1980s discussing "Cheers."
As a boy in the 1960s I grew up watching comedy shows set on POW camps and western forts and desert islands; comedies featuring genii and witches and talking horses. Fish out of water stories about hillbilly families striking it rich and moving to swanky neighborhoods; fish out of water stories where swanky city slickers move to bizarre country towns . . . In fact, I grew up watching TV comedies that showed imagination. Shows where people drove cars and trucks and tractors. Where they managed funny situations and funny lines without an obsession with sex.
People complained about canned laughter but I found it less annoying than live audiences forcing laughter on cue by signals and signs at what might have been a twelfth take. I got quickly tired of comedies run like stage plays where characters have entrances and exits rather than filmed comedies cut like movies. And though only a teen in the 1970s I got sick of the same-ness. Shows about families, some that got along, some that didn't. Some that had lots of kids, some with even more kids. And all the episodes of all the shows pausing just after the 2/3s mark to demonstrate a moral that never had anything new to say. The only show I watched regularly in the 1980s was "Newhart," a "Green Acres" retread but which, stagey though it was, was at least funny--a quality comedy writers had been abandoning for years in favor of high- and ham-handed social commentary.
"Frasier" was as stagebound and moralistic as any comedy show broadcast since the comedic imagination of the 1960s pooped out. And like the worst of the shows since then, it was just as obsessed with sex (well, Frasier Crane was a Freudian psychologist). And sex is titillating as the lowest common denominator for audiences and provides lots of easy laughs for lazy and unimaginative comedy writers.
What's funny about "Frasier" is, first, the characters. Frasier Crane is a psychologist on the radio (sometimes wonderfully, sometimes overactingly, portrayed by Kelsey Grammer). His brother, Niles, is a psychologist of a different branch of the discipline who has a weird (never seen) wife. Their father, a crippled ex-cop, hates their hoity-toity ways. The father's strange dog and his live-in physiotherapist, who has "psychic" episodes, add to the humor.
Frasier and Niles are like real siblings: similar but different; in constant rivalry, but closing shoulders and standing together when outsiders, or their father, threaten one or both. My late brother and I had a similar relationship.
Funniest of all are the sometimes insane things their father tells about Frasier and Niles in boyhood (for instance, seeing then gad about with derby hats and umbrellas after they started watching "The Avengers"); hearing the nutty things about Niles' off-stage wife; or hearing more of Frasier's or Niles' unnatural tastes. Neither is the sort of person normal people would love hanging with in real life--we've met too many who think their tastes are superior. Who sling around, say, opera terms. Or who claim superiority in wine or musical or artistic knowledge. Who needs them? But both Frasier and Niles make such types laughable, yet endearing.
And what other show can claim hosting legendary stage and screen actor Derek Jacobi as a notably bad actor?
Nevertheless. . . It might not have been so obvious when "Frasier" was first on, but watching it daily I noticed too many episodes where Frasier meets a girl who might have committed to him. Then he agonizes over some penny-ante problem in her or in their relationship and plunges headlong into making a speech about it, running her off. What a nincompoop.
Apart from that recurring nightmare, the episodes are usually written well to a high standard (apart from the constant, annoying misuse of "me" for "I") with enough bizarre twists in some episodes and even more bizarre mentions if something off-stage, to make them funny. Enough. Not as funny as "Andy Richter Controls the Universe," but that show sank like a stone while "Frasier," with a familiar character from "Cheers" and appealing to a lower common denominator, stayed afloat through the 1990s.
It's worth a peek; but since the humor is nearly all verbal (with, yes, notable exceptions) it can be followed just as well while you're doing other things and not keeping your eyes on it all the time. An especial irritation of mine since the 1970s: television is a visual medium but most comedies tell you what's going on and have little action and lots of talk. It's like visible radio. Whereas shows like "Green Acres," with lots of slapstick, demanded watching. And so did a notorious comedy featuring Barbara Eden, for different reasons. Apart from the silent-movie "tags" at the end of each episode, most of "Frasier" can be listened to from the next room with little loss.
Where is the American "Mr. Bean"?