For That’s So ‘90s Week, I’m taking a look back at some of the pop culture epherma of the ‘90s that sticks with this ageing Gen-Xer. Today, let’s head to Seattle… but not for the grunge.
There’s a lot of TV from the 1990s that people get nostalgic over. I don’t get the “Friends”-obsessed myself – it’s an amusing show, I watched it at the time, but I barely ever think about it now. “Seinfeld” is a masterpiece of dry, surreal comedy, but it’s also a comedy that refuses warmth (“no hugging, no learning”). “The Simpsons” is eternal, like rain or air, beyond mere human judgments. And I’ve never, ever understood people who claim to be huge fans of “Home Improvement” or “Full House.”
But “Frasier.” Ah, “Frasier.” For me, “Frasier” is the warm witty blanket of ‘90s TV, perfectly constructed one-act farces that I can watch over and over again without tiring. If asked, I’d have to say that I think “Frasier” is the peak of the traditional sit-com form – one that’s been deconstructed and reconstructed often since, but rarely bettered. At its essence, it’s another man in the workplace, man with wacky family comedy like a thousand others, but in its execution, it’s sublime.
The show often makes fun of Frasier’s pompousness, but I never feel like the show says “being smart is dumb.” The genius of “Frasier” is combining Frasier Crane’s lofty, intellectual lifestyle with his hubris, ego and fallibility. We see in Frasier the eternal struggle between ambition and reality, between what we’d like to be seen as and the ways we keep falling short. More importantly, “Frasier” makes that battle funny. As a coughcough 40-something balding male in midlife looking back and looking forward and trying to make sense of it all, I identify with Frasier now a lot more than I do Ross Geller or Kramer.
There’s more whip-crack smart, literary lines in an episode of “Frasier” than in an entire season of other shows.
Was it perfect? Well, some of Frasier’s hound-dog horniness and Roz’s man-chasing does seem rather problematic these days (although Frasier is no Sam Malone or Hawkeye Pierce, to be honest), and the Crane family’s Seattle is about as white and monocultural as it comes. And at 11 (!) seasons, the show lingered on a little too long into the 2000s, ending in May 2004.
Yet the show maintained a high level of quality almost its entire run – I have yet to run across a terrible episode of “Frasier” as I rewatch the series, and a huge pile of classics. Not a bad legacy at all for a ‘90s sitcom.
Nik Dirga 