Fraser’s writers set out to create an anti-Seinfeld skit

There’s a lot about “Frasier” that conveys the comforting aura of the quintessential ’90s sitcom. the “Frasier” sets that cost an enormous amount of money to buildalthough designed with a distinctive wood-panel aesthetic that has since become known as “Frasurbane”, still maintains the familiar warmth of sitcom sets from that era. The live studio audience, the laugh track, the comedy beats, even the film’s grain — it all belongs to the golden age of sitcoms that should be familiar to every ’90s kid who grew up on “Frasier,” “Friends” and “Seinfeld.”

But there’s also something very different about “Frasier.” Although it had a lot in common with those other legendary sitcoms of the era, it was also clearly trying to do something new. It wasn’t just that Kelsey Grammer’s Dr. Crane and his brother Niles (David Hyde Pierce) were the kind of elitist social climbers you didn’t see encountered on other sitcoms. It was also not the case that the show’s humor often dealt with more complex and ambiguous topics than its contemporaries. Since the first episode of “Frasier,” the writers have been subtly subverting many of the sitcom tropes that had become well-established by the time the series went on the air in 1993. In fact, co-creator David Leigh had a specific sitcom in mind as an example On what not to do when it comes to crafting a ‘Frasier’.

“Frasier” ran for 11 seasons from 1993 to 2004, cementing its place as one of the greatest sitcoms in the process — a legacy The revival of “Frasier” is neither disappointing nor notable The offer is not yet up to par. While many ’90s kids may now think of the series as a relaxing watch, the series was actually quite subversive in its own way, and displayed a kind of anti-sitcom sentiment from the beginning. The pilot episode – an episode that Niles’ actor David Hyde Pierce initially thought was “terrible”.

David Lee once spoke to Television Academy Foundation About writing this pilot, and explaining some of the guiding principles he and his writing team established. Specifically, the series’ writers set out to deconstruct and in some cases explicitly rally against major sitcom tropes of the time, with Lee explaining how the rise of “Seinfeld” gave them a perfect formula for subversion. In his own words:

“At that time ‘Seinfeld’ was on the rise and it was the beginning of what I call ‘short attention span theatre,’ where the scenes and sitcoms got shorter and shorter and shorter until it was basically, ‘This is the outside of a play’ in the building, you walk inside to tell a couple of jokes. “Or three, and then you move on to the next scene. Lots of scenes, little songs, and those work great. They’re great but we decided to try something different.”

Lee went on to explain his and his book’s approach to making “Frasier” an anti-theatre of “short attention span” embodied in “Seinfeld.” It began with the group writing “the longest scenes possible”, with Lee claiming that the goal in the end was “to have an entire episode happen in real time, or just have one scene in it, in one other scene”. The words are like a play.” But this kind of anti-sitcom approach to sitcom writing extended beyond the ordinary scenes.

To be clear, “Frasier” was not a complete overhaul of the sitcom format. Not only was it created by three sitcom legends in the form of David Angell, Peter Casey, and David Leigh of “Cheers” fame, but it also used the same multi-camera shooting format used by every other sitcom of the moment. “Frasier” benefited from sitcom directing legend James Burroughs, who also went from “Cheers” to “Frasier” and who has lent his talents to pretty much every show of the genre ever, including “Friends.” Pair that with the studio audience and the aforementioned general ’90s aura of the whole thing, and you get a sitcom that, on the surface, doesn’t exactly revolutionize the genre.

But when you look closer, “Frasier” has actually been trying to do surprisingly unconventional things throughout its run. Take the black title cards that separate the acts. These trademarks of the series are another aspect that arose from Lee and his writers’ desire to subvert sitcom norms. As Lee went on to explain in his book Television Academy Foundation In the interview, the mindset was best summed up by: “Do we need those exterior shots of buildings? Is the audience smart enough to know that if we’re in Fraser’s apartment he’s probably inside an apartment building, and we don’t need to ‘look outside of it?'” In fact , this type of establishing shot is so deeply ingrained in the DNA of sitcoms that we barely notice it when the camera pans to the side of the Friends apartment building in New York accompanied by a quick musical note to signal the beginning of a new scene, or even when we get an opening shot of a building. Jerry in “Seinfeld.”

However, for Lee and his crew, eliminating this standard sitcom feature was essential, creating black title cards between scenes. Even then, Fraser pushed things further by avoiding any kind of musical accompaniment at all. “We don’t have to have music, and to this day I think it’s still the only sitcom that doesn’t have interstitial musical cues for whatever it’s worth,” Lee noted. In that sense, while “Frasier” is more than capable of lulling you into ’90s sitcoms, it simultaneously maintains a deceptively subversive approach, giving us all another reason to love the show.