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.
