There can really be no arguing with the fact that when it comes to long-running sitcoms that the whole family can enjoy, Americans really have hit the nail on the head. Sure, they don’t always get it right, and ok, for every success story like ‘Friends’ there’s probably a hundred terrible abominations of television like ‘the King of Queens’, but the truth is, in comparison to Britain they have got the formula for the optimum ratio of laughs / longevity spot-bloody-on.
Britain does the unsettling ‘cult-classic’ sitcom expertly, but as funny as these might be, they tend to only run for about 12 episodes before the jokes become really old really quickly. Be it ‘League of Gentlemen’, ‘Peep Show’, or ‘The Office’, no matter how funny the jokes are to begin with, after reliving them for 2 series of 6 episodes, they tend to seem hackneyed surprisingly quickly. Seeing as how Americans tend to err on the side of squeezing good ideas for all they’re worth, their series are 24 episodes long. This has always made me super-suspicious of sitcoms that run for years and years over hundreds of episodes. TV shows like Frasier, in fact. But I now have to admit that the Commissioning Editors of US TV studios pulled the biggest masterstroke of all in forcing TV shows to run and run. Having watched just 5 episodes of Frasier last week, I’m left with a feeling that I haven’t had since I first ate bacon 3 years ago. I’ve realised that I had been missing out on something wholly incredible and now have a whole new world open up to me. I have a whole 259 more episodes left to watch – beat that Gervais!
For a start, Frasier and his brother Niles do the voices for Sideshow Bob and his brother Cecil in The Simpsons (two of the best peripheral characters). So every time I hear Frasier speak, I think of the joke in The Simpsons where Bob is having his parole meeting and they reveal his tattoo ‘Die Bart Die’ which Bob explains is simply German for ‘The Bart, The’, and one of the parole officers says ‘anyone who speaks German can’t be a bad man’ and sets him free. This only serves to reinforce me how much I completely love The Simpsons and how even though it has gone on for 439 episodes and Bart is 30 by now, it still doesn’t get old and that American sitcom writers must be incredible to keep on churning out so much material (even if it does tail off a bit round season 14).
What really appeals about Frasier is, for my mind, that it has all the usual themes that British sitcoms thrive, on like awkwardness and class insecurities, only they’re handled far better. It’s entirely made up of cringe-worthy moments, in a ‘Oh my god, I hope Daphne doesn’t open that door while the policeman is still in the flat!!’ kind of way, knowing that it’s just going to be one disaster after another. So the whole 24 minutes turns into a kind of emotional rollercoaster that ends up being quite exciting to watch – as all the different little storylines cleverly join up together at the end. I think Frasier only has a bad reputation for being ‘wanky’ because this is done soooo well it reminds you of reading a Noel Coward play at school.
At the end of this episode Frasier is performing a new jingle for his radio show on a piano, he says ‘to my ear, it’s still missing a tiny ingredient..’, and because he’s so pompus when the camera cuts back in…. you see that he’s only gone and got a full orchestra in to perform it!!
The jingle is really complicated with half a dozen verses of highfalutin language, exactly as you’d imagine.
Roz is his producer on the radio and she’s a slag, but in a really respectable middle-class way. There’s a joke in every episode about the new guy she’s seeing and how ‘well’ she knows him, if you know what I mean!! This one’s a musician, who probably had good ‘rhythm’ or something (I forget), but needless to say he was confused by the idea of playing a triangle and thought it might be hard (all the men she dates are duds).
The programme itself is also pretty pretentious (which I really like, because it makes you feel like you’re reading a Noel Coward play at school). Just when you least expect it, a scene will be introduced by a Title Card like this:
Which makes a vague reference to what’s happening in the episode (music), but doesn’t really make any sense (no one even mentioned Gershwin, or his teeth). I find myself sitting and waiting for someone in the programme to say the words on these title cards, but it never happens.
To illustrate Frasier’s haughty side and help him learn that his jingle isn’t what the world needs, his dad takes him aside and tries to highlight how something’s are better off simple and makes up a couple of catchy little jingles himself (that are all better than Frasier’s). Frasier dismisses this idea out of hand preferring to show off with his grandiose arrangement…
… But maybe the old man was right after all!
At the end of each episode Frasier has to climb down off his high horse and confront his problems honestly. When he does this everything turns out alright, which is the moral behind every episode (it is a psychiatric comedy, so had to have some self-help note hidden inside, didn’t it?).
The jingle becomes a really simple little tune that his dad made up everyone loves it. To celebrate everyone stands around looking really smug with themselves (including me). Excellent stuff.
Oh, and another reason to love it is because Kelsey Grammar really is as pretentious as he appears to be in the show. Check out this clip of him having a complete sense of humour failure when he falls off a stage during a speech.
