Frasier (And Cheers)

"Her lips said 'No," but her eyes said 'read my lips.'"

I say Cheers.

Frasier hit far higher highs and they struck comedy gold with the duo of Frasier and Niles, but the latter seasons were just not very good at all. They don't seem as bad now when you catch an episode by itself on Channel 4 some morning or whatever, but, when I watched it right through, there's several points throughout the show where it takes noticeable drops in quality and feels very formulaic (especially once Daphne and Niles get together properly, never fully worked and resulted in a pretty sizeable reduction of Frasier-Niles brilliance).

Cheers hasn't aged anywhere near as well (and, production values aside, it's a show that's far more suited to watching in bulk and getting comfortable with the characters) but it's a far more influential show, so far ahead of its contemporaries in most every way that it's shocking (I mean, what was the second best US sitcom from the 80s?) and consistent to a level that hasn't been seen before or since. Took me absolutely ages to get into Cheers properly but once I got into it I absolutely devoured the remaining couple of hundred episodes.

Kelsey Grammer is really a very underrated actor, deserves far better roles than he seems to get. His addition is the point where Cheers shifts from being the best show of its era to being a legitimately great show. Hyde Pierce gets a lot of the praise for Frasier but Grammer was given a near impossible task (to adjust a side-character he had been playing for a decade to be the lead of a show with a considerably more complicated scope) and achieved it effortlessly despite being strung out of his mind on drugs.
If he hadn't kept returning back to the Simpsons after it turned to sh*t he'd be inarguably the best guest star too.

Ruu wrote: »

NORM!