Fred and Loathing on The Internet

Niles Crane. Hung specialist. Servicing individuals, couples, groups. Satisfaction guaranteed. Tell me where it hurts.

2025-Jan-20

There are plenty of contemporary artistic productions that the audience is dying to hear me expertly opine on through my daft use of the written word. To be honest, I do not watch many ‘new’ movies or television shows. I would remark that I watched the first episode of Severance last night. If I had the graphic to accompany my thoughts on that show, then this blog entry would be me gushing about the beautiful drabness of that show. Once the graphics department turns in its work, the writing staff can get to work, bringing out a blog post about something fresh in the zeitgeist.

When the blog audience is not hounding me for current affairs, then it’s opinions on works of timeless art they want to hear about. Books of great literary feats. Musical librettos invigorated with orchestral grace. A painting of sublime subtlety. Examples of human creation that reach into your soul; unleashing a universal truth. Such artistic objects are not being critiqued today.

Instead we will be talking about an American TV sitcom that uses examples of fine art as comedy props to lampoon a lovably pompous radio psychologist, in his middle ages, living in a ridiculously luxurious condo in Seattle throughout the 1990s. That’s right, we are talking about Frasier. A sitcom character played by Kelsey Grammer for four decades. The Frasier Crane, of the Cheers, Wings, Frasier sitcom universe. And lately of recent revival sitcom fame.

That new ‘revival’ show has not lured me in. Not for one episode. Only a trailer or two. That was enough to see that the cosy warmth I got from the original Frasier is likely not found in this new show. This ‘cozy warmth’ is a vague term, that I somewhat fault the producers of that new show for not recreating. Vague considerations of warmth aside, I find it obvious that this new show will not deliver on the same magic I found in the 90s Frasier show. The only returning cast member is Kelsey Grammer. Frasier himself, and no other.

Martin Crane would have been difficult to cast. The actor died. Niels Crane’s actor is not too busy, as far as I can tell. For whatever reason, he chose not to join this new Frasier venture. Perhaps if all the living players were put back on the same stage, cozy lightning could be bottled again. I am not a television producer. I can not give more than my own misgivings as to why this resupply of Frasier Crane does not interest me more than a rewatch of the original series would, and often does. A very direct complaint I would have is that Frasier Crane is my third favorite character on his show. A revival would need more than just him.

Frasier, the original series, to me is a retrospective pleasure. It is something I learned to enjoy with repeat offerings. An acquired taste, such as organ meats, stinky cheese, or pickled seafood. Frasier food! Much like those kinds of foods, I was offered the sitcom Frasier when I was a kid. Child-me said politely ‘no’ to both Frasier and fancy foods. I was still curious about them both. They intrigued me as sophisticated tastes that I ought to enjoy more, or will learn to when I grow up. That there was some hidden value in whatever these two Crane brothers were going on about.

At a young age I found the pace of the writing to be pleasant. It had the comic rhythm I expected from sitcoms. What put me off was the utter ‘middle-age’ness of Frasier’s situations that the comedy was carved from. Back then I found them to be as banal as Woody Allen movies- a director’s name I learned at a young age to avoid for the preponderance of boring adult situations. (Much like Frasier, I sought Woody Allen movies out after realizing I had become an adult and might like the jokes I found boring as a kid). Frasier was ripe with Adult Content, but not the fun kind that the warning labels made to caution parents of impressionable children. Frasier was talking about lonely and/or subtlety written horny middle aged man problems. Not only the normal complaints of a bald dude in his forties, he made jokes about fancy historical or fictional characters I had no clue about as a child.

I have the suspicion that this new show might underplay the uber-sophisticated references Frasier would drop all the time. When I was a kid, I did not know who François de La Rochefoucauld or Caruso was, but those sitcom writers handled those names into jokes well enough that I could understand most of them. Enough to tease me. I like to think that Frasier put aspirational goals in young me. If not to enjoy the types of stuff Frasier and Niles bantered about, but to at least know of them.

My acquired taste for Frasier came in the form of a handful of choice episodes I had found during my torrent sharing era (2006-2012). By my early twenties I had a taste for bygone TV sitcoms that were not readily available as ‘reruns’ on broadcast mediums. These dozen or so episodes of Frasier I stashed on my external hard drive were found as single episodes among large tv sitcom collections I was searching.

Probably hunting for Newsradio. That was a 90s TV show I had zero trouble understanding as a child and was difficult to find on TV in the 2000s. That had some high-brow references that I also aspired to understand as well. That show was zany enough to make young me feel completely in on all the jokes. There was not too much adult re-appreciation for that show. Newsradio, or Third Rock from the Sun, or the later seasons of Seinfeld, lived in a wacky world that allowed for a lot of jokes that just would not fit into the ‘real’ world of Frasier’s adult contemporary life.

It is a little bit of luck that pulled me into Frasier. The episodes I found among the torrents were in noticeably better video quality than most 90s sitcom episodes I could find. I was not looking for Frasier and only gave it a chance because it was coming in clear on my laptop screen. More of the jokes landed now that I had a college education. Still not all of them though. Especially fine dining jokes. I felt in on the jokes and wanted more.

Frasier became a specter that haunts all my digital screens once the series found a spot among streaming services and I got used to the idea of having a whole TV series neatly indexed for my instant viewing pleasure. Netflix being the first streaming service I found it on. Sometime in 2013. By that year I would have considered myself a full-blown adult. Old enough for my young self to think he’d ought to grasp all the fancy jokes on Frasier.

Well, the expectations I had as a child would not have used Frasier as the metric. The Simpsons is definitely the target show for my young self’s quest to understand all the jokes on one show. The Simpsons show tossed up dozens of jokes in several of my favorite episodes that I later knowingly made an effort to understand. That show was the path I was setting my academic pursuits toward. The payoff of trying to understand all the jokes during the golden age of The Simpsons (1991-1999ish) had been an education good enough to catch all the foppish jokes on Frasier.

With the convenience of all seasons available on one streaming service, the coziness of Frasier glued together the series for me. Rather than being a patchy stream of a few episodes per season that I caught on television. Back then, during the era of only watching what was scheduled on the TV channels you had broadcast to your television set. At that time, Frasier was a show I would watch because nothing more interesting was on. It was not a favorite, yet there was a nascent warmth I noticed after the fact.

Another layer to this retrospective warmth I perceive from the show is the gap in broadcast from watching. When you are living through it, noticing what will become notoriously distinct about the decade you are experiencing is an almost impossible task. Frasier, as seen from 2013, pulled me into a different world that felt more nostalgic than the rebroadcast of many other sitcoms of the time. I had heard that the first Netflix distributions had low resolutions for the early seasons. At this time I cannot confirm that, nor do I want to do the investigative work about the medium standards for Frasier. What I will say is that the later seasons that were definitely filmed in a digital format feel like the 2000s, rather than the 1990s.

What distinguishes the 90s from the 2000s is a vague distinction that perhaps will be answered on this blog if I focus on enough media made in that fin-de-siecle era. I probably will.

Film vs video vs digital aside, Frasier looks more authentically 90s to me than most other TV comedies of the same phase in television. Friends, the sitcom, was a bit too hip to be an accurate glimpse into what people were wearing at that time. Those six cast members of Friends were the mannequins of a hip costume crew. A little bit too hip. The characters were often wearing more daring looks than what most people would actually dress. That is the flaw of trying to find historical authenticity by looking through old sitcoms. Instead you find how people wanted to look, rather than a more mundane truth.

The wardrobe on Frasier I’m sure was just as ‘fancy’ for its time. What I feel marks it as more authentic is how subdued the choices were for costuming. Although Niles is wearing expensive suits most episodes, they are plausible and steady choices for his character. Ross from Friends dressed like a catalog model is more of a symptom of TV production than an example of an academic living in 1998.

Clothes are not the only distinct 90s authenticity I feel Frasier has going for it. Frasier’s apartment looks to me like the most stylish apartment of 1995, and remains a steady contender for classiest looking living space. Frasier wearing the earth tones in his blazers and sweaters blends him into the cozy yet subtly expensive apartment that becomes the scene for almost all of the show.

Another retroactive pleasure found from watching the show is discovering the stage theater pacing in the writing and direction. There is usually a three act narrative in each episode, with each scene getting one setting. There is rarely any back and forth between locales or jumps in time. The story is kept in the confines of a stage play. I think that is a big secret to what makes Frasier so damn cozy. Also, from what I’ve heard, many of the actors had stage experience.

The television sitcom is an often maligned artistic medium. A negative connotation that I could understand. The television industry has to push out a lot of tripe to fill the airwaves. This idea of TV sitcom writing being inherently dreadful is a wayward idea. From when the sitcom served little purpose other than to get middle America laughing in between commercials during weeknights. The stage play, after the advent of television, became elevated as a higher form of dramatic presentation. I think that happened because stage productions at that point were less likely to get tripe pushed on stage. There was just less of an audience so there was nobody dying to put together plays that were destined to not be seen.

Personally I think that is why Frasier is cozy. Not why it is such a ‘superior’ television sitcom. It is a warm television blanket I wrap over myself instead of going out into new frontiers of television to challenge my tastes. Perhaps I don’t when it comes to comedy. I can’t fathom finding warmth in a newly produced multi-camera sitcom. The days of tossed salad and scrambled eggs are gone forever.