Frasier

Joseph J. Darowski teaches English at Brigham Young University and is the editor of The Ages of Superheroes essay series which has volumes on Superman, Wonder Woman, the X-Men, the Avengers, Iron Man, the Incredible Hulk, and the Justice League. He is the author of X-Men and the Mutant Metaphor: Race and Gender in the Comic Books.Kate Darowski has a Master’s degree from Parsons School of Design, and has written about design for Modern Magazine. She is the coauthor, with Joseph Darowski, of Cheers: A Cultural History.

He was originally called Frasier Nye, and, way back when he was conceived as a supporting player on the hit sitcom Cheers, the people who created the character imagined John Lithgow in the part. But eventually the he was renamed Frasier Crane, and Kelsey Grammer played him for 20 years, in Cheers and then in its spinoff, Frasier. The authors’ focus in this 'cultural history' of a fictional character is on Frasier, but they can hardly ignore Cheers, since the differences between the two shows, and, indeed, the differences between Frasier as he appeared in both shows, which range from the obvious to the subtle, are central to the character and his development. Obvious: Cheers and Frasier had vastly different comic and dramatic tones. Subtle: in Cheers, Frasier once said his father, a research scientist, was dead, while in Frasier his father, Martin, a former cop, was very much alive. The authors explore various elements of Frasier— the show’s production design, its use of intertitle cards, its casting (Niles, Frasier’s brother, was in the show only because somebody noticed how much David Hyde Pierce resembled a younger Kelsey Grammer)—to show how the producers were determined to make a spinoff that was markedly different from the original show and to make a comedy unlike anything else on television. For fans of Frasier, and for anyone who enjoy solidly researched, entertainingly written books about the making of a television show, the book is absolutely a must-read.