It's actually quite incredible how Fraisers plot lines work so well as an RPG. The random tasks, the sneaking, the subterfuge all for low stakes games.
It's also an interesting coherent world they made for the sitcom so the many locations can be expended to the Opera, the Symphony, Wine Club and on and on. I would pay for these 'episodes'!
Given they’re scripted as raucous stage plays (often Shakespearean in terms of layers of schemes), it’s kind of no wonder they work so well with a fantasy RPG format.
Yea I didn't want to layer too many points in one, but actually I was thinking how Shakespeare's models for comedy inadvertently make for great RPG scripts
AI generated Frasier episodes. It is algorithmically inevitable. Mark my words. Within the decade. Seasons of the stuff. And it will be pretty good too.
Part of me cannot wait. Like, I really want to see Frasier go on a date with a person who he (and everyone else) is only dimly aware is a xenomorph. We as the audience will see it as a full blown xenomorph and see it kill background characters while Frasier is bickering with Niles about something silly.
However, I cannot help but wonder in this presumably inevitable techno future of ours, how we will ever talk to anyone about the eventually fever dream quality of media that we'll each individually be consuming in unique niches.
I'm already reading Blindsight and wondering how in the world I can even try to explain this to people in my life. Somehow I imagine that it's going to be a lot more difficult to explain why I'm crying my eyes out after Magneto-Gandalf saves the power rangers from certain death from Venom Frasier and then convinces Frasier to finally take off the black suit.
I keep telling people “Blindsight is about vampires in space, it’s awesome and you have to read it” but most people just give me a weird look and ignore the advice…
It has vampires in space, but it’s not about vampires in space. It’s a strange book, but if I had to say, I’d say it’s about how intelligence can be divorced from consciousness and how utterly eldrich aliens might be.
Humorously enough there's a Peter Watts essay out there someplace bemoaning how the scramblers ended up as starfish aliens just like how everyone else does their eldritch aliens.
The book clearly does a lot of legwork in the 'third act' to really sell the main thesis. Which is great the first time through, but I think makes subsequent readthroughs less impactful. I however always enjoy about the first two thirds.
As a software developer, I spend a lot of time looking at the increasingly complex behavior (and even downright 'cleverness') of non-conscious entities. So my takeaway is less "life, but not as we know it" and more "YES, just like that, that's exactly what I've been trying to tell people for years." Unfortunately, explaining my day job in terms of Blindsight isn't exactly a step up.
> crying my eyes out after Magneto-Gandalf saves the power rangers from certain death from Venom Frasier and then convinces Frasier to finally take off the black suit.
If that doesn't make you tear up, you're dead inside. That's my explanation.
To be fair, there’s a significant proportion of sitcoms that are just regurgitated formulas.
Some studio is almost certainly feeding sitcoms and standup comedy into some horrific LolLLM, but it would almost certainly reject prompts such as “The gang goes black” or “Frank gets molested”, and the outcome of “The gang makes Lethal Weapon 6” is unlikely to be even half as entertaining.
Off topic, but have you seen the trailer for the upcoming season? It looks like it might as well have been written by AI. We’re about to get a reminder of how important the supporting cast was on that show. Sad!
I haven't watched it yet but do bare in mind that a lot of great shows took a few episodes (or even a couple of seasons) to find their stride. Frasier was no exception, the first few episodes were setting stage for the rest of the show.
But as I said, I haven't seen the new series so I cannot comment on whether there's anything there to grow from.
David Hyde Pierce (Niles) and Jane Levees (Daphne) have both declined to return, and John Mahoney (Martin) passed away in 2018; the only returning member of the main cast is Peri Gilpin (Roz), who's only going to make a single guest appearance. Bebe Neuwirth (Lilith) is the only recurring cast member to commit to the new show, and only in a single guest appearance.
The temporary Twitch suspension was due to some of the generated dialogue. I'm not clear if they were forced to remove the Seinfeld stuff? In any case, the new version just doesn't compare: https://www.twitch.tv/watchmeforever
To be honest, I'd take that over about 90% of what I get on offer now, at least the new stuff. With one condition - no one ever tries to "improve" or "modernize" it.
Codebullet on youtube has been doing AI generated Rick & Morty episodes, complete with animation and voices. They aren’t great, but still pretty impressive.
>> can’t bring myself to check out that new season!
You aren't alone. I got maybe ten minutes in. It is the now Kelsey Grammer show. He is surrounded by actors that do not challenge him at any level. In Frasier, it was a groups of actors/characters, each of which could carry an episode on their own. Frasier also did edgy stuff, for the time. This new thing is just another rehash of "old guy revisits past acquaintances", akin to Picard but without the trek ornamentation and excitement.
I don't really think you can dismiss an entire show and cast based on ten minutes of viewing.
I wasn't blown away by the first episode but I'm interested to keep going. People often forget the the first season of many shows (comedies particularly) are particularly ropey while the writers and actors find their groove.
That said I'm considering it an entirely different show to the previous Frasier, much like Cheers was. I'm kind of glad they haven't gone directly back to the old well.
>People often forget the the first season of many shows (comedies particularly) are particularly ropey while the writers and actors find their groove.
Parent mentioned Picard, well the first season of ST:TNG is a prime example of this. Some of the worst episodes in all of Star Trek are in that season.
Speaking of Picard and getting past first seasons. I tried watching Picard and only got a couple episodes in and wasn't enjoying it so I stopped. I guess I should give it another chance.
At first glance, I felt they were going for an entirely different show. But, at least the first two episodes seem like a direct rehash of the same story from Frasier. Freddy has taken on the salt of the earth, regular guy persona of Marty Crane, Frasier is himself and starting a new life in a new city, they are moving in together and their personalities clash. You have the free spirited and quirky friend of Freddy as a neighbor to fill the Dafney void. and then of course you have Miles' son to play the fastidious, nervous, comic relief. I'm half expecting him to fall head over heals for the neighbor.
> Enduring the bad in hope of the good is for those without options.
lol, I feel like that sounded very good in your head… we're talking about half hour sitcoms here, not eternal strife.
If you gave up on comedies within the first ten minutes you’d miss some of the best that’s been done in recent years. But sure, keep sampling things at ten minute intervals if it’s what suits you best.
I only have so much time during the day. Work is busy. I have about two hours between getting home and going to sleep this month. Im not going to donate thirty minutes, a quarter of my free time, to a show that isnt great when there are plenty of other shows to watch that are guaranteed to be great.
Our Frasier Remake - crowdsourced, collaborative art project where more than 130 animators, filmmakers, and Frasier fans from 11 different countries have remade the Seattle Psychiatrist most meta episode... one frame at a time.
It’s very clever. But what I enjoy most is that it’s just completely low stakes. There’s never any real troubling story arc. It’s all just silly harmless fun. This makes it “cozy TV” for me.
Harmless fun? If you're able to empathize and have a bit of social anxiety Frasier is the most high stakes show ever.
The brothers get themselves into the stupidest situations, make asses of themselves, and never come out on top. Its the opposite of Seinfeld( great show).
Yeah, totally fair. If one is very emphatic to that kind of thing, it can definitely be uncomfortable.
What I generally intend by "harmless fun" is exemplified by the episode where they buy and ruin a posh restaurant in a day, but you never hear any mention of the financial ruin from that. Whether they're super rich or not is simply not explored in the show because it's not relevant to the goals of the storyteller. It's like a cartoon: they've just got infinite resources whenever a plot calls for it.
That's quite unlike Bob's Burgers, for example, where they're constantly pointing out that they can't even pay rent on time and there's a constant looming anxiety about finances (which to the credit of the show, contrasts meaningfully with how the children are happy and healthy and want for little)
> Whether they're super rich or not is simply not explored in the show because it's not relevant to the goals of the storyteller.
What?? I thought the show obviously portrayed Frasier and Niles as wealthy yuppies.
Frasier rents a luxurious 3 bedroom apartment and Niles is married to a woman named Maris who is the heir to a urinal cake fortune. They live in a mansion!
I think the point was more that they were never lacking resources. They had exactly as much money as required. There were plenty of minor plot arcs which would bankrupt a normal person. The casual spending of money was just a means to change the scene and/or make the inevitable failure inconsequential.
One of the plot lines deals with Miles getting a divorce and temporarily having to live like a normal non-rich person, driving a hatchback (which he calls a hunchback) and living in an appartment. Before (and soon after) Miles is quite affluent, and Fraiser is not far behind.
He's not living in a stereotypical apartment -- it has a large living space (in which he's able to host fairly large parties for the upper crust), a well-appointed kitchen, a separate floor for bedrooms, and a third floor that's never seen on the show.
They are insulated. By their wealth. By their professions and education. By their infinite capacity for...
I don't want to call it "self deception". But their fine intellects allow them to interpret anything to suit their preferences. To rationalize anything. And they do.
> That's quite unlike Bob's Burgers, for example, where they're constantly pointing out that they can't even pay rent on time and there's a constant looming anxiety about finances
To your point, like Fraiser, it's often used a plot device in Bob's Burgers and generally, like Fraiser, everything turns out OK. For me, a lot of it is more defining the social class and context of the show. Will the character be comfortable in a wine club? How will they interact with this setting? What problems would they have?
>Harmless fun? If you're able to empathize and have a bit of social anxiety Frasier is the most high stakes show ever.
I've seen and loved 99% of Frasier episodes, and never once thought of it as a high-stakes show.
Perhaps it's because I lack empathy, but I'd like to think that it's that I have always lacked the desire for pretension (despite having an educational, professional, and social background not dissimilar to the Crane brothers'), so never took personally the anxiety Frasier or Niles felt at failing to fit into some gathering of their peers.
Upon further pondering, more proof of this is that I am among those who get very anxious when I see people get embarrassed. But it has to be a situation where it feels "unfair". When Frasier or Niles make fools of themselves it's always because of their own pretensions, not anyone else's.
This is totally it. I would add that for me it's extra cozy because I used to watch it (and love it) as a kid growing up in Eastern Europe and now, I live in Seattle! I rewatched it sometime during the pandemic and the jokes hit way closer to home than when I was a 13 yo kid, both from the fact that I'm now an adult and from the fact that I understand why someone calling from Tacoma has a different problem that someone calling from Medina hahaha. All in all, a great show.
> I also didn’t realize that almost all of the callers are uncredited celebrities.
Yes! That's another sort of 'easter egg' I found when I rewatched it. There was someone who sounded just like David Duchovny and I looked it up and down the rabbit hole I went.
like a lot of shows from that era (in my opinion), you may end up needing to push through at the beginning... but it does settle in relatively quickly. there are almost no bad episodes in the entire run.
Frasier was a staple of late-night reruns during my early-aughts teenage years. So I've seen a lot of them and know the characters well. Yet I think it would be worth a re-watch. I enjoyed it at the time but suspect that there were more subtle points and humor which my young, naive brain did not pick up.
I re-watched Frasier recently. As with most 90s and adjacent sitcoms, the stuff that holds up least is around changing gender norms. Frasier often comes across as a sex crazed narcissist, who we are supposed to be rooting for. That was the joke at the time too, but sometimes it doesn't age well.
Still worth rewatching, however.
Another interesting example of 90s sitcoms and evolving gender roles would be Ross from Friends. A modern expectation of how a man should act in a long-term relationship would probably consider him to be emotionally abusive. But I didn't find his conduct all that bad in the 90s. I think a few years ago it was a fad for gen-z to watch Friends, so I think I'm not the only person to note this.
I love the incongruity between the source material (a sitcom about and popular among middle-aged, middle-class types) and the media format (a video game). This reminds me of the scene in the film Waiting for Guffmann where a character runs a shop selling Remains of the Day lunchboxes and My Dinner with Andre action figures.
Love everything about this, especially the chiptune renditions of the various themes. Channel 4 in the UK has a couple of episodes of Frasier every morning, and whenever it rolls over from the last series back to the first episode, everything just feels right in the world.
Fun fact (or conspiracy), Cheers and by extension the character of Frasier Crane were plagiarized from a late 70s local Boston sitcom called Park Street Under.
From that one it seems clear that the similarity is the choice of character roles and the setting, and not at all in the lines of the scripts for the pilot or any of the other episodes.
It stinks that they lifted those things. But that's not what I had assumed when I read the word "plagiarized" in OP's comment.
(To the head writer's credit, he never used that word.)
> Cheers director James Burrows has long denied his show was lifted from Park St. Under, maintaining that it was inspired by Duffy’s Tavern, a radio program created in the 1940s by his father, Abe, a Tony Award–winning humorist and writer. The troika of Cheers creators... claimed to have modeled the Cheers bar on Boston’s Bull & Finch, which they visited while developing the sitcom.
> The similarities between the two make an argument for some kind of influence. The question of whether Cheers took something from Park St. Under, however, obscures something vital: As special as the little Boston sitcom was, and there’s reason to think it was truly loved, it was never going to be Cheers. It had its shot. ABC Entertainment president Tony Thomopoulos... told Bennett, “I like them, but I just want to tell you they’re really not deserving of being on the ABC network level.”
> One reason, perhaps, why the legend lived on so long is that Cheers affirmed that there really was something great about Park St. Under.
> To me, the things that are so lovable about Park St. Under—the local feel, the rough-around-the-edges inside jokes that make it seem familiar—aren’t the things that made Cheers such a hit.... With its production woes and shoestring budget, she didn’t even think season two of Park St. Under was likely to happen. The claim that Cheers made off with a ready-made hit misses what the local show really was—the good and the bad.
> Does this mean the legend is finally done? Doubtful... The claim that Cheers looted the show is just too juicy and has been part of local legend for too long to be forgotten entirely.
> Three men developed and created the Cheers television series: Glen and Les Charles ("Glen and Les") and James Burrows, who identified themselves as "two Mormons and a Jew."
> The original idea was a group of workers who interacted like a family, the goal being a concept similar to The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The creators considered making an American version of the British Fawlty Towers, set in a hotel or an inn. When the creators settled on a bar as their setting, the show began to resemble the radio program Duffy's Tavern, originally written and co-created by James Burrows' father Abe Burrows. They liked the idea of a tavern, as it provided a continuous stream of new people, for a variety of characters.
> Early discussions about the location of the show centered on Barstow, California, then Kansas City, Missouri. They eventually turned to the East Coast and finally Boston. The Bull & Finch Pub in Boston, which was the model for Cheers, was chosen from a phone book. When Glen Charles asked the bar's owner, Tom Kershaw, to shoot exterior and interior photos, he agreed, charging $1.
>Three men developed and created the Cheers television series: Glen and Les Charles ("Glen and Les") and James Burrows, who identified themselves as "two Mormons and a Jew."
I served my LDS mission in Nevada. One day, while tracting, we knocked on the door of the Charles brothers' parents. One of the sons' Emmys sat on the cable box on the TV.
Does that matter in terms of who the show's creators were? Writing credits are a rather political system that doesn't actually reflect who did the writing.
Like 12 people in a writer's room may contribute to an episode fairly equally, but only one person's name is semi-randomly chosen as the official writing credit.
Apparently they had a psychiatrist character named Harvey Dorfman:
Harvey: “Look, I’m Dr. Harvey Dorfman. I wrote the book Success Through Fear. [Audience laughs.]…I live in the South End, so perhaps I can help you. And I’m a psychologist, so I’m qualified to help you. And I’m sympathetic, so I’d like to help you. Can I help you?”
I love the line about "Success Through Fear."
I'd be curious to know if Dorfman had a Boston accent. Frasier's character worked because he was an outsider to Boston. Also, IIRC his references to psychiatry were supposed to come off as earnest-- and often pretentious-- setups for the other characters' punch lines, unlike this quote.
Dorfman's tone lacks the subtle disdain Dr. Crane has for his radio callers.
I think one of the most interesting things in Frasier is his struggle to find his identity, between radio host and psychiatrist. As far as I remember on the show he never had any "real" patients, just his callers.
> Dorfman's tone lacks the subtle disdain Dr. Crane has for his radio callers.
Kelsey Grammer I know was cast as "Sideshow Bob" on the Simpsons before he was a radio host in Frasier, but I always thought he brought a lot of the Frasier character to the Sideshow Bob character. The disdain manifesting of course as homicidal rage with Bob.
>Dorfman's tone lacks the subtle disdain Dr. Crane has for his radio callers.
I've seen 99% of Frasier episodes and never once got the sense that Frasier has disdain for his callers.
The show wouldn't work if he did, because Frasier is a good person. His snobbishness and pretensions are funny characteristics, but they don't define him.
I think you're right; it's more he disdains his own station vs being a "real" practicing psychiatrist working with patients over a number of years like his brother. But he also loves his callers, and deeply values when he can help them.
Frasier does not disdain or dislike KACL in any way. He could go into private practice anytime and does so briefly. Frasier quite enjoys being a local celebrity.
If anything, Niles is the one who envies his brother, however mildly; despite his jokes about Frasier's "fast-food" psychiatry, Niles sometimes admits to envying how his brother is well-known, and that he helps many people over the air while Niles's own work is anonymous to the public.
I don't know where this idea that Frasier is a snob comes from. A "snob", to me, is someone who looks down upon those he views as his lessers; views them as fundamentally different and forever unable to achieve his own far greater status. Frasier never once acts as a snob to his uneducated father. He never shows anything but respect for Daphne despite being the product of a family from the bottom of Manchester, and never says or implies that she would in any way be unfit for Niles (Niles's own marital status conflicting with his lust is a different story).
Frasier sometimes gets irritated by Martin's habits, or failure to appreciate the same things as his sons. He sometimes gets irritated (but more often amused/bemused) by a rambling or bizarre story from Daphne. But if such is the definition of snobbery then we are all snobs. To put another way, we are all snobbish about some things (and the Crane brothers have more things on their own lists than most people), but only snobs believe that such things make them inherently better than others.
Sorry that's confusing - by his own station I meant his own work situation.
It's true that Niles also envies Frasier. This is not mutually exclusive - there's no need for any "if anything" statements that require a binary choice.
As for snobbishness - I didn't mention that. So I'm not sure what to make of the bulk of your comment.
This is only tangentially related, but I Hear The Blues A-Killin' (or: Frasier Meets Columbo) is a short comic which i think manages to capture to feel of both Frasier and Columbo remarkably well:
Unbelievable
My sister and I have been watching Frasier for over 20 years now. It's our comfort show. She had a Frasier themed birthday party. I'm so excited that this exists
I feel like moments like this are bizarrely coincidental. I was just watching Frasier for the past few days, playing retro emulators and working on my own game....weird
Well done, so much attention to detail here. Makes me wonder how much can be done with existing stories that people know about, in new mediums. Love your Monkey Island poster too.
Not sure how that's at all relevant to somebody's labor-of-love game here.
Also, yes he was accused, but he was never even indicted for it. The grand jury didn't think there was enough evidence to even warrant going to trial. His defense claimed it was an attempt by the babysitter to extort money.
Obviously nobody will ever know what really happened, but it's hard to see how it has any connection to this videogame at all.
How about when he was given a light sentence for driving while drunk and on coke because he was a beloved actor on Cheers but then spent decades espousing conservative tough on crime rhetoric. He sure seems to like progressive sentencing when it benefits him.
I watched Frazier as a kid and thought it was kind of funny. Rewatched as an adult and it hits different. It’s like watching a show about a psychopath. You could replace the laugh track with an internal monologue American Psycho style and it makes so much sense.
Eh, Frasier is definitely a narcissist, but I wouldn't go that far. He means well, but typically only if it also benefits him. That tends to be most protagonists in sitcoms though. Frasier was a static character and didn't really grow as the show went on.
Compare that with Niles who grows throughout the show after losing everything. Niles at least realizes being rich isn't important if you're not happy.
No, Frasier is just a pompous but ultimately harmless asshole. It’s the Niles character I take issue with. The weird-nerd-with-oneitis who-gets-the-girl-in-the-end trope of 90s comedy is to a large extent to blame for the current incel crisis.
It’s not misogyny, narcissism or a sense of entitlement. It’s that these boys were raised by the TV and socialised into a system of courtship based on putting in superficial acts of niceness and receiving heartfelt love and affection in return. Regrettably when they find out the truth they often lash out at the women, because who would do such a thing as go on TV and tell lies?
It's also an interesting coherent world they made for the sitcom so the many locations can be expended to the Opera, the Symphony, Wine Club and on and on. I would pay for these 'episodes'!