I guess this would be a good place to acknowledge my own relationship with Frasier. I first watched it as it was broadcast on TV as a child in the UK, then again in my first year of university, where we would take the DVD boxsets out of the library and watch it late at night after we’d left the pub, smoking weed in our student halls. And then I watched it through again maybe five years ago, online, during a bout of depression. Stressed out in a toxic workplace, my evening routine was always the same. I’d drop in at the takeout lunchtime sushi place on the way home, shortly before they closed, and pick up a bento box with half-price discount. By 7pm I’d be in bed with sushi, a coke, and a packet of haribo, and I’d watch episodes of Frasier, chainsmoking joints, until I passed out around 10pm. It was miserable, and to some extent, my feelings around the show are tied in with this depression, and the strange, unlabelled depression I was clearly suffering in my first year at university. And yet, watching the show now, happy, I’m never reminded of those own prolonged periods of misery. During those times, Frasier was a perfectly pitched balm: not excessively challenging, but also not junk TV that would leave me feeling worse, less motivated, more useless than before. It felt like I was watching something, and I appreciate it for that at least.
I suspect there’s a whole category of TV shows that fulfilled this purpose, for a whole generation or more of depressive, anxious stoners lacking access to decent mental health services, or trapped between shit jobs and debt. In Britain, it seems a type, the stoner comedy, from Spaced to Father Ted to Peep Show. For me, it was Frasier that hit the sweet spot. Perhaps later viewings reminded me of watching it as a precocious kid — I had, for a short few months, a hamster I named Frasier, on account of his markings, which resembled a tweed waistcoat pulled over a white shirt. Or perhaps it was something about its distant, culturally speaking, from my own childhood. It was a depiction of America that was both legible and aspirational, but distinctly alien and unattainable. Maybe I’ll pin it down, this time round.
That said, there were a number of episodes I always had difficulty watching, episodes that raised just too much anxiety for a stoned depressive to bear. The impending catastrophe was too clearly laid out, or the comedy of manners upon which the jokes turned too mean. The first of these episodes is season 1, episode 3: Dinner at Eight. It’s the first episode to really deal with the latent class conflict between father and sons, and in many ways, the most visceral and pained. The nastiness set my teeth on edge. Frasier and Niles have decided to introduce Martin to “the finer things in life”, sure that his ignorance of opera and theatre is down, in part, to the amount he had to work to support his children. They plan to take him to their favourite French restaurant, Le Cigar Volant, to initiate him into a new cultural education.
The plot is a take on a classic theme, a sort of patriarchal Pygmalion. George Bernard Shaw’s play, later adapted into the musical My Fair Lady, revolves around the same idea that boys take to: the transformation of a working-class person into someone ‘respectable’ through exposure to upper-class manners and culture. As an idea, it’s unpleasant and conceited enough as it stands, but applied to their own father, there is added another level of shame and cruelty, a toxic and loveless motif that makes for such anxious viewing. The situation is exacerbated when it’s turned on its head. Lacking a reservation at Le Cigar, Martin offers to take them to his own favourite dinner spot, The Timber Mill. This restaurant is the polar opposite of the Le Cigar, a working-class mass-catering spot serving steaks and baked potatoes. Dinner becomes a canvas on which to paint their snobbery, mocking the staff and clientele, until Martin breaks. He invokes his dead wife, who becomes the super-ego of the show, a woman whose memory alone is enough to chastise the two psychiatrists back to being misbehaving little boys. She shared their highbrow tastes, Martin reminds them, but without weaponising them against others. Frasier, as everyone knows, is a snob, and Niles is worse.
I think the dead mother is a useful character, managing to explain the inexplicable class gulf between Harvard-educated sons and cop father. Were such a character to appear, it would be hard to imagine how she would work, or even be believable. What sort of person would she be, to connect these two disparate roles? As a figure, she’d be unwritable. But in her absence, she serves as a useful plot device, as well as a useful tool for Martin. I’m struck by the similarities between Martin and Livia, Tony Soprano’s mother, in the early moments of both shows. They help ground the main characters, both belligerent in their refusal to live in a care home, and both invoking their dead spouse to induce the nagging anxiety of the show’s stars. Livia’s refrain on her late husband — “He was a saint!” — is as much a tool of chastisement as a recollection. Hester Crane serves the same function — she is a Deus ex Machina more than a woman, a device inserted into the plot to resolve a conflict, a cold glass of water to the face that serves to bring the boys back down to earth and to remind them of their upbringing.
It’s clear you’re supposed to identify with Martin, the salt-of-the-earth cop, in such situations. And yet, when we look closer at the brothers’ unconcealed social climbing and their snobbishness, isn’t it worth looking at what might be behind it? As sensitive, perhaps even effeminate children, they were subject to recurrent abuse for their interests which were clearly sincere and not an issue of “pretence”. Their over-identification with upper-class culture can surely be attributed to the fact that, in their cultural circles of opera and wine, their knowledge and taste are valued rather than scorned. Martin’s response is frequently to mock and humiliate his sons for their inability to thrive in the masculine manner he clearly hoped they’d inherit, such as when he openly expresses shame and embarrassment at their lack of proficiency in sports. And then he wonders why his sons, unlike their mother, don’t “like a good ballgame”, and why they express derision at culture and food they don’t like? Martin might have identified that they don’t take after their mother after all — if he looked a little deeper, he might realise they’re taking after him.
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1.3 Dinner at Eight
If the writers had leaned into that conclusion it might have squared the circle of the Hester Paradox you identify, too; if she had died much earlier, say in Frasier and Niles' young adulthood, it would do a lot more to explain the boys' stark divergence from Martin by the time of the show - their insecure social climbing, his descent into bitterness and grievance.
A recent death can adequately explain Martin's bitterness, but not Frasier's resignation to it being insurmountable - pilot Frasier is a man who has long ago learned not to even *try* to bond with his dad.
That final line is genius! I've watched the show countless times since it originally aired, and this is the first time I've considered that aspect.