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What can I add to the many positive reviews here of the Frasier series? I would watch "Cheers" if I happened to be at home when it was shown, but it was never a priority in my life, although I did think it was among the best TV sitcoms.
However, since being introduced to Frasier a decade ago I find it still, after many many viewings, a "must see".
One of the most interesting aspects of the series is watching the way the writers and actors round out the characters. The very first episodes, where Frasier and Niles argue about who is to get the booby prize and therefore have Martin move in, are amusing. Martin himself starts out as a really cantankerous man, Daphne is introduced as a whacky Mancunian (but without a genuine Mancunian accent)and the initial impression is of a new sitcom trying to find a theme and not really succeeding.
However, when you get to see these early episodes again and again, you can see the way the parts quickly meld into the whole, the individuals start to interact and everything lifts off into almost certainly the best sitcom ever written.
The mainstay characters Frasier, Martin, Niles, Daphne, Ros, Maris and Eddie become real people, so that part of the joy of watching them and their development is the frisson you get when you know how they will react to some situation, and that almost tangible interaction this creates between the writers and the TV audience. Some characters are written out - Chopper Dave is an example - and some become casual appearances like Bebe, but all have believable and recognisable behaviours. The casual viewer may well miss many of the asides, the running gags and the double meanings of many of the inserted titles, but this makes it all the more enjoyable for the addicted.
There has never been a series so well written, constructed and acted in the history of TV comedy, in my opinion.
The setting-it-all-up episodes (probably the first three or four) are at times a little uncomfortable but then the characters have become fully rounded and taken on a life of their own and the series becomes self-sustaining. The apogee probably occurs in the second third: when the unrequited love affair between Niles and the uncomprehending Daphne comes out into the open one of the mainstays of the comedic tension is diminished, and something is lost. However the scripts do then go on to explore other aspects of the Crane mindset, albeit perhaps a little less effectively.
Frasier is sometimes compared with Seinfeld. I cannot watch the latter, which to me epitomises some of the worst aspects of American sitcom shows: the one-liners, the bongy-bongy-BONG musical underlining of each crack as if to tell the canned laughter machine "this is where you laugh".
Frasier is outstanding, and I can watch each one time and time again. Can you say that about many shows?
score 10/10
wilsr 30 December 2009
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2183210/ |
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22-11-2019 13:30:34
